


Amaranthine

by midnightflame



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Battlefield Violence, Character Death, Established Relationship, Five Stages of Grief, Grief/Mourning, Hopeful Ending, Kissing, Love, M/M, Reincarnation, Seduction, Sex, Time Loop, War, coming to terms, falling in love all over again
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-22
Updated: 2017-09-22
Packaged: 2019-01-04 03:11:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 35,001
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12160347
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/midnightflame/pseuds/midnightflame
Summary: Keith had watched him fall. One moment standing there, then knees had hit the dirt and the rest of Shiro’s body had followed. One moment was all it took for the world to run black, then fire up red as blood across the earth. Just when grief sinks its claws into him, morning breaks with scenes Keith knows because he has already lived them, knows that in just a few hours his entire world will end once more.Shiro had watched him fall. One moment standing there, and on the next, Keith’s body had dropped to the ground, heavy and silent. One moment for the panic to start snarling in its cage and set the world buzzing with static in his ears. And just when the grief sinks in, morning breaks with scenes Shiro knows far too well because he has walked every step of them, and he knows that in another day the best part of his world will end once more.It happens again and again, their world recycling itself as one end is traded for another. That is until the inevitable reality of their circumstances brings Shiro and Keith to a standstill, leaving them with a choice hinging on their faith in the universe.





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> We're finally here! I can't tell you all how excited I am to have been part of this Big Bang! It's been an absolute blast and I have loved working with my artist [@nocturneis](https://twitter.com/nocturneis) over on twitter for this piece.
> 
> [AND HERE IS THE AMAZING ART](https://twitter.com/nocturneis/status/911288500854521856)
> 
> As a little background on the title, if you visit m-w.com you will find this under amaranthine: "Long ago poets conceived of a flower that did not fade and christened it amaranth. The appellation is rooted in the Greek words amarantos, meaning "immortal" or "unfading," and anthos, meaning "flower." The word amaranthine emerged as an adjective of the imaginary flower and subsequently of anything possessing its undying quality."
> 
> Now, this is a story that is the close of a rather long cycle of them, and I will highlight this and the other pieces involved in this timeline at the very end of this work as to avoid spoiling anything. But I hope you all enjoy this story, for all its heartbreak (you may very well need tissues for this one or so I have been told!), it's ultimately a story of love and an exploration of grief, but it's also a story of hope. Thank you for taking the time to read this and please go give my artist so much love for the work done on this! I've screamed endlessly over how good Noct's stuff turned out on this!

“Sit.”

A single command whispered against Shiro’s lips with a smile, and Keith finds that Shiro can’t help but pull a kiss free in its wake. An act Keith complies with, offering no complaint about it but only wrapping his arms around Shiro’s shoulders as he continues to walk them both backward. Step by step, he draws them deeper into this bedroom once designated as his alone but had long since become theirs.

“Is that how we’re doing this now?” Shiro murmurs.

Another step. Another kiss. Keith feels the tug of it over his lips, this languid luring forward of all that he would give, of all that he could ask of Shiro in these moments that define them down to the very cells of what they are. Beyond the mantles of Paladin and hero, down down down to the essence of their cores, the very blood that runs through their veins. In these moments, there is no separation of self, only this intermingling of existences, hearts that beat in sync, thoughts that align, souls that find every bit of themselves that had been missing in the space between worlds and lives. 

Years and years that have gone only to spark with recognition from a single look, a smile, those first fleeting moments of touch.

Because in the dark of this room, where the only other breath is Shiro’s, warm as it matches his own, there is absolutely nothing, and then there is everything. In this room, they simply are, as free as this world will allow them to be.

“Yes,” Keith answers into that kiss, with a smile coy and inviting.

And Shiro needs nothing more. He hooks a foot around the lone chair in the room, the one that typically sits abandoned beneath the desk used more for storage than for anything proper. Tasks like writing notes or letters or studying languages that still slip through his thoughts like sand in an hourglass, reminding him of how little time he has for all the universe demands of them.

Demands that Keith never ceases to salvage Shiro from night after night, or with a glance, brief and concealed but loaded with worry while they stand waist-deep in the beckons of another mission.

Another chance to get it right for the universe. Another chance to lose themselves to the infinite of the galaxy.

Shiro drops into the chair with a grin, legs spreading wide as his hands slip from Keith’s hips. Every time he thinks of all the ways they might lose one another, he remembers moments like this. Remembers the heat that puts fire to Keith’s gaze, the want that parts his lips, the desire to tease that ultimately curls the corner of his mouth into this irresistible little smirk. A look that damns him as much as it saves him. Shiro runs his tongue over his lower lip, then laughs as Keith tugs off his jacket with a quirk upwards of his eyebrow. It hits the floor with a concentrated _plop_ , dull as so many to-be-forgotten sounds tend to be.

When Keith reaches for the hem of his shirt, Shiro presses back into the chair, runs his hands down along the tops of his own thighs. The black T-shirt works its way up, inch after gratifying inch, along Keith’s torso, exposing skin and a burgeoning network of scars. The first one sits on his right hip, a Marmora dagger not dodged quickly enough during training; the second scar spills into view several seconds later, running a crisp and clean line over Keith’s last three ribs on the right side. He had gotten it after being thrown into a cavern wall by an all too feline and feral beast. The last one sits large and devastating over his right shoulder, the very first of Keith’s scars and the one Shiro recalls most vividly.

T-shirt dangling from his hand, Keith sets Shiro with a look full of unabashed confidence, the sort of look that promises a man far more is still to come and causes Desire to riot in its shadow.

Shiro finds the corners of his mouth curling in response. When he speaks, his words are soaked in warmth, all the sweetened honesty a heart knows as truth.

“You’re beautiful, you know that. . .”

******

It’s loud. Too loud.

Always has been, always would be. That’s the truth Keith has come to know and acknowledge over the years. Just as he knows there are only three times when silence tends to reign on a battlefield. The first resides in the calm before the hurricane of war hits in full force. The second when victory sits assured, and flags are raised high and white. The third is when every last one of the so-called enemy is laid out across the dirt, bodies as empty as bullet shells, their lives having burst and expired, left as nothing more than husks of what they had once been.

All the rest is swallowed by the chaos of war, a deafening cacophony calling out for the end of an era.

Someone’s at least.

Right now, they are well beyond the beginning of this fight, entrenched in the sloppy muck of it on a planet that had cried distress for months. One they had only just reached. Because in war, Keith knows, you also have to pick your battles, and this one had been put off in favor of other more pressing, more strategic moves. Now, it has left them facing a bitch of an army hardened and entrenched, and a population so demoralized the majority of them would have chosen death over fighting the good fight.

So, they’re here fighting it for them, and there is guilt whipping at their backs for not having been here soon enough.

A grunt cuts across Keith’s comm set, and he immediately recognizes it as Shiro. He turns his head in the direction he had last seen the man, where he had successfully fended off two Galra soldiers and left Keith with enough peace of mind to charge into the next hoard of them approaching him. Shiro is still standing in the approximate place Keith had last noted, with another body added to the pile at his feet and his mouth pulled tight as a garrote. Keith wants to call out to him, badly, but there’s no time. There’s never enough time on the battlefield. That’s why they say quick thinking and quicker reflexes are your best allies when you’re grinding down in the hard reality of a war front.

But for far too many caught in the stranglehold of battle you can never be quick enough.

It’s the only thought lifting itself from the mud-and-blood mix of the world around him. Keith parries the first blow that comes at his head, a split second before it arrives, but all he sees is the way Shiro’s body lurches forward and drops with the echo of a thud. The shallow breathing is his own, however, and the heart crying panic is sitting deep within his chest. And as he drives his blade through another throat, the growl that launches itself off of his tongue is full of a fury boiled within his own blood.

Another body hits the dirt. Something in Keith’s chest vomits up black grime all over his lungs, making it impossibly hard to breathe.

“Shiro!!”

Because try and try as he might, he hears only silence over the line.

******

Keith always takes his time undressing in these moments. At least, when the whim overtakes him, telling him that he can be on full display for a single pair of eyes that knows his skin as intimately as he knows Shiro’s heart. Minutes spent on unraveling himself while Shiro watches, enrapt, and Keith can always pinpoint the exact moment Shiro’s heart dives just a little bit deeper into love.

Because Shiro inevitably starts to laugh, this low and gentle thing that washes over his lips with a bowed head and a gaze that flits back and forth from Keith’s figure to the hands sitting uselessly against his thighs. His cheeks flushed, Shiro smiles at him, unable to hide the pleasure these bedroom antics bring him, and it makes Keith want to drag out the seconds for as long as he can sustain them.

Fingers run across the breadth of Shiro’s back, skipping over the nape of his neck to dance up the back of his head then jumping down to trace along his opposite shoulder. A shudder ripples down Shiro’s spine. Keith lets his pants drop with the metallic click of his belt knocking against the floor.

“Don’t turn around,” he whispers against Shiro's ear, leaving his lips parted so the laugh that follows it can slide out unobstructed and warm. It’s a small sound, though, more of a hint than a full-blown realization.

A quiet whine strangles itself in Shiro’s throat.

Wrapping his arms around Shiro’s shoulders, Keith leans in against him. His lips drift along the side of Shiro’s cheek, each breath measured before it’s released, each beat of his heart echoing against Shiro’s back. He presses a kiss to Shiro's skin, right along the curve of his jaw then following the line it takes towards his chin, ends with one against the corner of his mouth.

“Do you still want me?”

“Yes,” Shiro whispers, voice run harsh and dark as ink ground against stone.

Keith feels his lips curve, the pleasure of that single word working through him like rain over the desert, and just like those too brief storms, it spawns a flood of life eager to partake in its renewal-sparking violence. Fingers climb from Shiro’s shoulder and settle against his forehead. Once situated flat across the expanse of skin there, they press his head back, their command slow but direct, exposing the line of Shiro’s throat and parted lips alike. Their gazes meet briefly, Shiro’s burning bright as iron in the forge, and it is all the incentive Keith needs to move.

His mouth hovers, no more than a fraction of space above Shiro’s. He could jump it so easily, the same way his sight had hopped from one star to another all those years ago, when he had settled himself in against the dirt and stared up at the vast blue-black of the sky above, counting hopes for every silver glimmer.

And right now, Shiro’s mouth is curved with the most hopeful of smiles, just waiting for Keith to fulfill the promises those looks had made to him minutes ago.

“I think I’ll always want you, Shiro.”

His lips paint every syllable against Shiro’s, unhurried brushes of words as the truth of that statement sinks like lead into his chest. In reply, Shiro leans up and kisses him. And it is warm, and it is fierce, and it tells Keith there will never be another in the heart playing a rampant rhythm beneath the palm pressed firmly against Shiro’s chest.

******

They are taking him.

Theyaretakinghimtakinghimtakinghimtakinghim. . .

A cry rips itself from his throat as Keith lunges forward. He pulls his blade from the body of one soldier, only to plunge it into the next with a fury bordering reckless. They rush at him, as always, with the same heedless lack of concern carried by all mechanical creations. An order given is one simply obeyed; there is never any question. With every second afforded to him in his fight, Keith pushes himself that much closer - another step, another inch, another means to take back what the Galra Empire had no right to be laying their hands on. They had done it once, three years ago, and they had taken from him then like they are taking from him now, and there is something savage clawing at his ribcage, driven reckless by the memory of it all.

Finally, there’s a break in the swell of bodies around him, the last unit demolished, their sentinel forms crackling with death cries all around him. Keith takes off at a heart-driven sprint, stumbling over the ruts and guts of a battle-scarred earth. Several hundred feet ahead of him, a Galra soldier has Shiro by the neck of his Paladin suit, long fingers curving around and down the inner edge of it. Like a kitten being dragged from one place to another, only there is no safe haven awaiting Shiro in the end, and there is nothing of life left in his form.

He’s dead-weight, the backs of his hands, his legs scraping across the planet’s rocky surface with no signs of discomfort. No telltale twitch of his lips, no quiver of pain along his brow.

There is simply nothing.

Keith takes aim with his blade, pausing only to gauge the distance through rapidly blurring sight, then lets the weapon go with a harsh sob. It hits, as intended, centered in the soldier’s back, fault lines cracking the surface of his armor in a radius around the place where his spine should be. The soldier takes another step, heaves a sigh up towards the sky, and finally collapses to his knees.

Shiro’s body hits the dirt again with a heavy, sickening sort of thud that has something pulling tight at the bottom of Keith’s heart. Like molasses left to sit too long, this sticky dark mess of emotion congeals there, suffocating his cells. He could spend a lifetime scrubbing and still not remove it all, leaving only scratch marks and scars for the effort.

It hits him by the time he drops to Shiro’s side, knees digging into the cool red of the earth, fingers numb and shaking as they scramble to pull his helmet off.

Because he realizes that there is a fear that can devour hope, spitting the bones of it right back out at his feet, and he knows at that moment that there is nothing in this world that can save the things that he loves, the very things that put the rhythm to his heart.

Least of all himself.

******

A smile dances over Shiro’s lips as he leans in close, arms wrapped around Keith, who has been planted over Shiro’s thighs with his arms draped like silk across his shoulders for the better part of ten minutes now. But that smile. . .it’s bright, sparkling there in the darkness of the room, flooded with satisfaction and an adoration that has never once lost its edge over the years.

Keith can’t help but marvel at that. At how a person can hold onto something, keeping it polished and gleaming, never letting its luster dull when so much in this world would have its surface charred, its face marred, as if to remind them all that there is nothing kept beautiful in this world.

Not for people like them.

And if the world couldn’t color it black, then time would grind it down until it was nothing more than grains of sand and memory.

Shiro cants his head, letting the tip of his nose run light along the line of his jugular. Keith tries not to laugh but finds it impossible when Shiro is the first to break. The sound is gentle, full of silver and every ounce of human hope ever offered to the stars. Because for all the blood on their hands, all the scars dug in like trenches along their skin and in their minds, Shiro still believes they are the good of the universe.

And Keith lets himself believe that too.

He feels it when Shiro’s lips part, first for a lazy kiss that has him pulling Keith tighter against him. Until chest slides against chest, skin aftermath-warm, and Keith can feel the even beat of Shiro’s heart trying to align itself with his own.

Then lips part again to set loose a low but solid whisper against his throat, and it feels as though Shiro’s words are sinking right into his bloodstream, like skipping stones having completed their purpose and now forever owned by the depths.

“I’m yours,” Shiro breathes out. “No matter what happens. . .I’m yours, Keith.”

Sinking and reminding him that there are a million ways for a heart to break.

A million more for it to love.


	2. One

He doesn’t dream often, but when he does they spin worlds out of his fears as the deep dark of his mind tries to make sense of his current situation and his past. Sometimes, the two collide, creating this distorted realm where Keith can’t tell if he’s standing in the present or in some year long gone. Or maybe it’s some weird amalgamated version of the future that tells him he can’t escape his then and most certainly not his now. Both past and present share in the fate that’s wrapped itself around him as tight as a lion’s breath-crushing bite over a zebra’s windpipe. 

Sometimes, his dreams tell him there are things waiting for him that may be the very death of all that he is, of all that he could want. 

When Keith dreams this morning, however, it comes with panic as well as a startled awakening. The images of Shiro falling still shimmer in his mind, all heat over desert sands, promising him reality when he knows there is nothing but dashed hopes waiting on the horizon instead. It had felt real though. The blood is still rushing through his heart at a rampant rate, and his fingers still feel numb from gripping his blade too tight. He swears he can still smell blood and taste the sweat trickling over his lips, both salted with bitterness.

And he can still see the empty space where Shiro had once stood. 

He casts his gaze around the room, noting the way the lights have already responded to his movements by shedding the dusky lavender glow that bathed their sleeping hours in favor of something yellow and electric. It’s the sort of bright that reminds him of the shock of waking from his dreams, harsh and blinding, taking moments to adjust himself to its essence. The room is quiet around him though.

Too quiet. 

Keith glances at the bed, at the sheets twisted around his legs and the pillow crushed beneath his hand. He blinks away the haze in his mind, the fading after-images of Shiro’s demise, and only then registers the fact that he’s alone. 

Shiro isn’t here. 

Panic bubbles like bile at the back of his throat once more, spurring his heart into a headlong rush again, as though each beat is trying to outrun an avalanche. And maybe they are, because the fear is rising dark inside his mind, growing large and black with every remembered second of his dream, and Keith is trying to convince himself there is no truth to the things that haunted his sleep. There is only the fucked up efforts of his mind to make sense of his world on some level he will never completely understand.

That’s what Pidge had told him once - that dreams, the ones we really remember and stick like tacks into our heads - are all the things we fail to recognize in full while we’re awake. They’re the things we let sink into the deepest, darkest crevices of our minds, and when sleep lowers our guards, they come driving up from the depths to try and sort themselves out. She told him they did this so they wouldn’t dwell down there and eat us alive from the bottom up. 

Because dreams can do that. They can be the monsters of our own making, maul the very best of our reasoning and leave our hearts in shreds. 

The thought of Shiro missing (no, not just missing but gone in a way that’s an irretrievable loss) persists, however, and Keith can’t quite kill the disquiet that’s sending ripples through his blood and right into his chest. He’s up and out of bed, ignoring the way the sheet catches on his ankle and is torn halfway out into the room before he disentangles himself from it completely. He leaves it there, like a ghost deflated, defeated by the far more horrid creatures currently kicking his thoughts into a mess. 

Room after room is empty. First the kitchen, then the med bay, the hangar where Black sits patiently, no different to him now than she had been at any other time. Keith pauses there, his gaze lingering on the lion, feeling the faint crackle of a presence that’s not his own and yet intimately linked with everything he calls the best of him.

Heart, blood, soul. 

Somewhere in the mix of all of that, someone else exists. Keith can feel him the same way he remembers feeling heat climb across his skin when he held his palm out to a desert bonfire. It grew hotter and hotter, right at the center of his palm, its warmth radiating out towards his fingertips, his wrist until all Keith could feel is the way it suffused throughout his entire being. With a faint nod of his head to Black, he slips out of the hangar, the panic still vibrating in his veins but no longer rocking his heart with turmoil. 

Because he still doesn’t know. 

He thinks he knows, but Shiro could simply be a fading memory, like the glow of an ember still burning beneath the ashes, the last flickering of a soul. He’s afraid of that, somewhere deep in the same dark that dreams construct themselves. Afraid that one day Shiro will be no more. Afraid that he won’t know the man he will become when that happens. That fear calls out to him from the depths, reminding him again of how heavy a body could be when the life has drained from its confines, of how easy it had been for a Galra soldier to drag him across the battlefield. 

Of how he could only watch. 

Because some things, Fear whispers to him, can be plucked from your very existence just like pulling a petal from a flower. Ask yourself if he loves you, then watch helplessly as the world drags him from your life.

Keith feels emotion ball up tight within his throat and threaten to choke him when he tries to swallow it back down. Maybe put it somewhere closer to where his heart sits because isn’t that the place they’re born from? At least these sorts of emotions, the one birthed from love and all its subsequent pain. 

Everything falls to silence the moment Keith enters the control room. Shiro is leaning into a projected view of their current galaxy, circling his index finger around two planets sitting side by side like twin moons and glowing bright blue. He knows those planets, Palikos and Deilloi. They’ve been discussing them in depth for weeks now, the former having sent out a distress signal for Voltron nearly four months ago. One cry for help floating in a vast sea of them, and as they now sit one day out from arriving near their orbits, it’s become a matter of which planet to try and rescue from the Galra first.

Or do they launch a two-front offensive with the Blade of Marmora? In essence, no Voltron, but bolstering the Lions with their ranks and hoping that proves enough to liberate both fronts. Shiro hadn’t been sure. From what Pidge and Kolivan had deciphered from the messages, the planets’ populations had already been on the verge of being overrun by Galra forces. Allura had wished for a speedy rescue. Kolivan and Shiro had more pressing concerns about the number of Galra present and the fact that they had continued to leap from one battle to another over the last month with no more than a handful of hours to call rest between most of them. 

Saving them isn’t the debate. Like any war, it’s how you went about waging it.

But the sight of Shiro standing there now has put the life right back into Keith’s heart in a way that makes him feel like it’s cracking in his very hands. Too much, too soon, just as a dam can be overwhelmed and the water rushes out to reclaim the land it had never forgotten was once its own. Everything Keith had tried to convince himself he didn’t need to feel in those moments after waking from his dream now floods his veins, his mind, reminding him he had felt and feared. Reminding him that those emotions are very much a part of him. 

Just like Shiro himself. 

“You’re here. . .” 

The words fall like the first drops of rain during a spring storm, soft and near weightless. Keith feels something constrict around his lungs. For a moment, the world sparks black before him.

Allura and Kolivan, who had been rather avidly marking points for and against their stances on the upcoming battle, put silence on their tongues and turn their gazes fixedly on Keith. He shakes his head until they all come back into proper view again, his sight springing bright with color once more.

“Keith?”

“You’re here. . .” he repeats, and this time it’s his words that are breaking over his lips. One moment Shiro is standing before him, the next he’s falling towards the charred red earth like a forgotten wish. His eyes start to sting, and with a brush of the back of his hand over the right one, Keith turns quickly on his heel. 

It’s stupid. He knows this. It’s stupid, he tells himself. 

Shiro is right there, alive and well, and all of this is just another bad dream spun from the horror of too many battles and near misses. It’s nothing to cry over, and yet the tears are there, biting at his lashes. His bare feet are soundless over the castle’s floors. Keith thinks he just might make it to his room when he feels a tug on his arm, a hand wrapping around his elbow and pulling him into one of the conference rooms. He doesn’t even think to fight it because he knows this touch, and part of him hates that he knows it so well.

Because knowing things that deeply only invites pain. That exquisite sort of pain that burns bright as a star’s impending death only to explode moments later, rippling throughout the galaxy of all that he is until every ounce of him knows what it means to love.

“I saw you die. I was right there. . .”

The words are out, fast and jagged, cutting up his tongue and his heart. But Keith can’t deny them. Not when Shiro is so close, not when his scent fills the air, overriding the memory of sweat and blood. 

“A dream?” Shiro asks quietly. 

Keith sucks in a shuddering breath. “. . .it was too real. I was there. I felt everything. The wind, the weight of their bodies when we fought. . .I could still feel it when I woke up.”

He feels it again, that panic bubbling like molten lead in his core. The tears grow hotter along his lash line once more, and yet again, Keith is wiping at them as though the very act would somehow dam up the flow of them. 

“You were so close to me, Shiro. I could have made it to you if I had only fought a little faster, or if I had seen that one soldier before he got to you. . .”

When his gaze finally meets Shiro’s, Keith notices the strange flash of recognition in his eyes, the small twist of his lips that suggests something hit a little too close to home. But just as he parts his lips, Shiro is placing both palms against his cheeks and holding their gazes steady on one another. The contorted frown over his mouth straightens itself out, proving that a smile always looked best when it came to dressing Shiro’s lips.

“Keith, I’m right here.”

When the kiss presses itself softly to his forehead, Keith finally lets himself breathe. He feels the calm of Shiro’s presence, warm as the sunlight he still remembers from Earth’s summer mornings, radiating out from the contact. Slowly but surely infusing every last inch of him with the security of a life known and cherished until Keith feels it filtering into his very soul.

Under the weight of Shiro’s touch, the din of panic falls silent.

*****

Deilloi is a ruined planet.

Grass grows in sparse black patches across an otherwise drained landscape. All across its surface, small patrols of Galra sentinels rove, stopping only to investigate one dark hole sunk into the ground or another. At more infrequent intervals, large crane-like structures loom over yawning gaps in the earth, where walkways are cut into their inner walls in zig-zagging patterns. Like sharks rising from the very heart of the planet itself, whatever is still left beating of it, ready to swallow populations and hope whole. 

Ready to swallow them as well, Keith had thought. 

They’ve been fighting for hours now. It had started with the Red and Black Lions along with a small contingency of Marmora’s fighters, each holding their own well enough against the more sparsely spread sentinels and the handful of Galra fighter ships that had launched from the main base. Then a dark purple light had catapulted itself from one of the shark-mouth holes eating into the earth, devouring Keith’s heart in the process.

Black had been shot out of the sky, her wings clipped by the attack, and sent tumbling down to the planet’s surface where she and Shiro had landed with a crash that had the ground beneath shuddering from the impact. By the time Keith had flown back over, Shiro was dropping down from his Lion, grunting across the communications line that he was fine.

The Black Lion, however, wasn’t. 

She’s motionless on her side by the time Keith maneuvers Red nearby, every bit the wounded animal Shiro’s voice had indicated she was. As much as Shiro had tried to cover it, Keith had heard the worry buried deep beneath those words of assurance. He feels the same brand of worry clawing up the back of his mind and knows not all of it is his. When he leaves Red, it’s with a gentle pat to her leg and his gaze scouring the planet for Shiro’s location. 

Something coils in over itself at the back of his mind, over and over, full of restless energy that has something buzzing in his ears and his heart scrambling to remember. He knows this feeling; he knows this place. 

To his left, there’s an outcropping of rock, streaks of vibrant red coursing through it in unsteady lines. It crumbles at his touch, disintegrating down into pebbles that tremble at his feet. As they vibrate against the earth, a keening sound starts echoing against his skull. He knows that the whole outcropping will tumble down, as fragile as an ant’s hill, the moment a body is tossed into it. 

Keith bypasses the rock formation, panic encouraging his feet to move at a faster pace. He needs to not stay here. He needs to get to another location.

Closer. Closer. Closer still.

Shiro is standing only yards away from him. At his feet are two bodies, warm because that’s what the blood on the ground tells Keith they would be. It’s a much different end than the crackling of sentinel forms sparking out their dying breaths. 

“Keith?”

There’s surprise spreading across Shiro’s features. Keith flicks his gaze from Shiro’s face to the hand holding itself over his left side. There’s red there too, brilliant against the backdrop of his Paladin suit. Deep in the dark of his mind, something screams. Keith shuts his eyes against it, willing the sound into silence. 

“We can’t stay here. . .” he breathes out.

“The Black Lion isn’t responding to me right now. That magic from before. . .that was a Druid’s doing.” 

“We can’t stay, Shiro.”

“We can’t leave either, Keith. We still have natives locked in that base and in the caverns below.”

“You’re injured!”

The words explode from his mouth, volatile and desperate. Fear swims in his gaze; it feeds on his heart. 

“Keith, I’m right here.”

His gaze snaps back to Shiro’s face, eyes narrowing. “What do you. . .”

But there’s no time to pull apart that statement. Shots char the earth around him, none of them given in warning. Just poorly aimed or unlucky in their range. Keith isn’t about to argue which is better or worse as both left him alive in the end. But they’ve forced him back behind another rock face, which has now put Shiro clean out of his view.

Panic starts gnawing again, digging into his heart like wolves scraping flesh from bones then breaking into the marrow. A pain unlike anything else ever inflicted upon his body. It grates, and it grates, carving the life out of him until only the fear of a life fading rings hollow throughout his soul. 

“Shiro!”

A harsh growl answers his call. Keith rolls his body along the line of his shoulders until he’s pressed against the edge of the outcropping. Shiro has his Bayard in hand, running it through another soldier. But that’s not where Keith’s attention has gravitated towards.

Memory pounds at the back of his head, hard then harder still. Pounds until it’s a roaring ache reverberating throughout his skull. 

Stepping off the back of a Galra transport ship is a soldier larger than most, reminding Keith of Antok but without the underlying good intentions. Fanning out around him are a dozen sentinel soldiers, another handful more of Galra warriors, all of them heading for Shiro. Keith knows how this will go. The sentinels will charge in first, breaking from a steady trot to an onslaught-driven run. And Shiro will cut each of them down in due turn, one after the other, no more meaning to the act than in driving a machete through the brush. It’s simply clearing a way for something more. 

The second wave will rush in next. Shiro will battle, flagging but fierce, defiant in the face of impending death. Keith imagines this is the experience the Arena had given to Shiro - how to fight under insurmountable odds, how to survive them. So, Shiro will fight through this, and that’s when Fate will sever his string. 

Shiro doesn’t survive the third wave, a lone Galra soldier towering over him like Behemoth, as unconquerable as the universe itself.

Keith knows this is how it will end, only he’s not bogged down by his own herd of sentinels this time. It hits him, hard as debris in an asteroid field, that memory had pulled him here. No simple dream landscape, no divine intervention. Instinct as driven into him by memory alone, allowing him to find Shiro faster, no minutes wasted on second-guessing himself.

That’s when he launches himself back out into the open. His Bayard has already flared to life, and he’s cutting into the fray seconds later, flanking Shiro’s injured side quickly. It becomes rote motion after that - a target sighted, blows parried, death delivered. One after the other, like a deck of cards dropped, bodies fall around them. 

But that’s always been the way of the world - kings and queens, the lowliest of numbered pawns, every single of one of them will eventually falter before their ends. For some, it simply comes sooner than others. 

“Wake up, Black!” Keith screams, his chest heaving, the words caustic on his tongue. 

From the corner of his eye, he has watched Shiro stumble over his own weight, has seen the set of his jaw and the effort taken to gather himself for another hit. And all the while, the same Galra soldier trudges ever forward, as relentless as the press of Time itself, and Keith feels the memory of an unwanted death cutting cold and clean into his soul. 

“He needs you!” Keith calls out again. Another soldier crashes into him. This time when his blade sinks through armor, it meets flesh, and the mouth in front of him contorts with pain. The soldier does not cry out, however. Simply shoves himself off of Keith’s blade only to topple backward over another body. Turning from the sight, Keith levels his gaze on where the Black Lion lays lifeless. “I need you!”

_He’s going to die. He’s going to die. We are going to die._

The thought rushes across his mind like a runaway train, pulling panic and fear in its wake, threatening to unseat reason. He scours the grounds around them again and realizes with a sinking clarity that the soldier has his sights locked on Shiro. Keith isn’t even a spot on its radar.

It’s always been Shiro. 

He sets off at a sprint, his lungs burning through oxygen and scorching with their need for more. But he doesn’t stop. Keith levels his blade, leaps onto a boulder and springs himself into the airspace over the Galra soldier. Somewhere in the background, he can hear Shiro shouting, but the words are lost to his own scream.

Then the earth starts rumbling. A roar cuts across the land, and Keith watches as the ground splits beneath the soldier, as his foot sinks into the crevice and his hands fly out to catch himself as his leg gives. He doesn’t miss the opportunity granted. As gravity pulls him back down, Keith delivers the point of his sword right through the base of the soldier’s neck. Beneath the blow, the body shudders, then stills. 

When he looks over at Shiro, there’s fear dancing in his gaze, unlike anything Keith has ever seen before with him. He recognizes it though. It’s the fear bought by skirting a set-in-stone reality, by realizing just how close you had come to prophecies fulfilled. This is the fear that comes when you realize you’ve defied Fate, and you’re standing there, waiting to see what the retribution for that may be. 

Keith pulls himself to his feet then dislodges his sword from the soldier’s body. Not at all clean, certainly not easy. And when he looks towards Shiro again, it’s to see his mouth set firmly and a crack in the earth between them as thin as a dying hope.

*****

“What was that look all about back there?”

They’re inside the castle again, locked away in Keith’s room. Shiro is standing there, shirtless as he looks over the bandage pressed to his side. A sentinel’s blade had just barely pierced through his armor, which had explained the hand pressed to his side and increasingly stilted movements during the battle; nothing vital had been damaged, but the muscle torn through and abdominal cavity just barely breached. Several hours in a cryo-pod followed by a bit more traditional medical practice, and Shiro had been allowed to follow Keith back to their quarters once bandaged up and given a _concoction to knock pain on its ass_. 

Lance’s words, as rephrased from Kolivan. 

“Which one are you talking about, Keith? The one where Coran was telling me to sit down and take it easy? Or was it the one where I was telling Allura I didn’t need to spend ten hours in a cryo-pod?” Shiro says it with an acrid smile, the bitterness not quite reaching his words but pulling his lips tight nonetheless.

Keith isn’t letting it call him off. “The one at the end of that fight. Where you looked like you had just watched the death of your own future.”

Shiro stops running his finger around the edge of the bandage, and instead, takes to staring Keith down through the mirror. His mouth pulls to a bloodless line, the pink rushing back in seconds later when he parts them for a sigh. 

“Maybe because I thought I had. . .” he admits in a voice quiet and broken by the weight of that singular truth. 

“You saw it too. . .” Keith murmurs, his eyes still holding onto the gaze of Shiro’s reflected image. “Why didn't you tell me when I came to you?”

“What good would that have done at the time, Keith?” 

Shiro turns around, setting his sight directly on Keith now. It had been one thing to see the reflection of that look, distant and questionable as mirrors could sometimes to make things. Maybe it had been there, or maybe it was nothing more than the shadow of something else. Keith could have convinced himself that the pain in Shiro’s gaze had been nothing more than an afterimage, dying embers of what had flashed across his face on the examination table, but what he sees in Shiro’s eyes now is unmistakable.

That death hadn’t just been dreamt up. It had been felt and expected, and when it was cut down before him, Shiro had been left with a future no longer weighted by the anchor of his life’s expiration. Dream or not, Shiro had lived it just as vividly as it had been for Keith. 

He’s closing the distance between them, and with every step, Shiro is spilling words into the air.

“It was a dream. I don’t know how or why we experienced the same thing if it even was - “

“That soldier cut you down.”

“- the same thing, but I can’t explain that to you. I couldn’t then -“

“He dragged you from the battlefield. Before my very eyes. . .”

“ - and I can’t now, Keith. I can’t. . .”

“I found you faster because of it.” He reaches out, placing his hands on Shiro’s face, one to each cheek, and directs Shiro’s gaze back down to him once more. “So, I don’t give a shit what it was if it meant I could save you from that.”

Shiro’s next breath shudders over his lips, putting a faint tremble into them. It reminds Keith of the way leaves would quiver before a storm. When darkness starts to consume the sky, there’s always that slow sweep of wind, whispering of violence yet to be, and as it runs itself through the trees, the branches wave and set their leaves to shaking. 

He never could decide if it was in warning or farewell.

“Tell me that’s not worth it.”

As his eyes shut, Shiro starts to shake his head. Keith watches it all, feeling the way skin slides against his palms until Shiro pauses and presses his lips into the curve of one of them. 

“You’re the best thing I’ve ever done with my life. . .” he murmurs. 

Those words trace all the scars across his heart, and for one moment, Keith can’t find the words to answer. He can feel them though, clinging to his throat, refusing to be swallowed down with all the rest of the pain inspired by the single statement. As he exhales, Keith slides his other hand around to the back of Shiro’s neck, slips his fingers into his hair, and leans up. 

When his lips find the corner of Shiro’s mouth, Keith whispers his reply in a voice trying to hold itself together with the force of emotion alone. “I won’t be the last good thing, Shiro.”

As the final syllable drops, Shiro opens his eyes. The gray still smolders with pain, but there’s something brighter there now, flickering with promise there in the ash. He shifts his head slowly, drawing his lips back to where they can meet Keith’s in full, then he’s kissing him. 

It’s slow at first, questioning every bit of what they are in this, drawing the answers out of Keith as he responds in turn with a parting of his lips. Every moment weighed, every breath measured. Keith digs his fingers into Shiro’s hair, and still, Shiro holds his gaze. With every passing second, the light in Shiro’s eyes sparks brighter, casting the pain and all other denizens of the dark away from the surface of all that Shiro is. 

All that Keith knows him to be. 

“Tell me again, Shiro.”

A smile begins to unfurl over Shiro’s lips then, tentative but gaining confidence. Keith can feel every minute movement as it curves against his mouth, and when Shiro starts to laugh softly, Keith can taste it. Like sugared cinnamon, warm and sweet. As honest as a plateful of apple pie and _welcome home_. 

“I’m yours.”


	3. Two

“No, screw that Garrison shit. We’re playing fuck the dealer.”

“Lance, language.”

“I’m twenty-two and five years deep in an intergalactic war. Fuck language, Shiro.” Lance pauses for a moment, lips pursed before curving into a wicked smile as he leans over the table. “Besides, that’s the actual name of the game, oh fearless leader. Guess you’re just going to have to deal with that.”

Pidge snorts while reaching across the table to pull a dark purple chip from the plate set at the very center. Before the oozing green mess smothering the surface of it can splatter over the deck of cards below, she’s shoveling it into her mouth and wiping her hands with a flourish of fingers across her shorts. They’re still the same steel gray, cut a little shorter now, with a pair of black leggings beneath them that end at her ankles and showcase the dustings of finger-food far better than the shorts could ever hope to do. She wiggles her bare toes as she settles back into her seat and gives her thumb a quick lick.

Some days, Shiro finds himself amazed at her growth, at all the ways she’s settled into their war-spun world.

“Aces high or low?” she mumbles around her mouthful, grinning at Shiro when he lifts an eyebrow at her. Continuing to feed right into the chaos it would seem.

Other days, he wonders where maturity decided to camp out in the castle because it somehow forgot it was supposed to aid in growing minds. 

“Aces are always high,” Shiro replies, and there’s nothing to stop the smirk from calling itself smug at the corner of his mouth. If this is to be the game of the evening - and not the one built around the cards - then he isn’t about to let his team go running recklessly around him. 

Wouldn’t give himself much room to play that leader card later on, now would it?

Lance huffs out a laugh at that, snagging several loaded chips from the center plate and cramming them into his mouth as well. A low hum of appreciation works its way into every bite, eyes closing while the rapture brought on by the glory hitting his taste buds takes him home. As he swallows down the last piece, he places his hand over his heart, closes down over the space there, then throws his hand open in Hunk’s direction. 

“First, dude, you have my heart because these nachos are phenomenal. I don’t even care what you made them out of. Second, Shiro, get your dick off the table. We all know how you feel about aces. And yes, Pidge, aces will be trumping kings tonight.”

“Tonight? Doesn’t that happen every night?” Pidge snickers, throwing a glance in Keith’s direction.

He remains oblivious (and it may be entirely feigned, to which Shiro has to give Keith credit for what’s proven to be a hard lesson over the years but one worth the learning), but Shiro does not. The verbal jab sets a small bruise blossoming over his heart - not because it’s wrong in any real sense of the word, and it certainly doesn’t bother him to any notable degree - but because callouts have never been exactly kind in their delivery. It’s the bitter pill of truth when taken; only this one has him swallowing down a small part of his ego along with it.

Not that his ego has ever been much of a thing to start with, but it persisted nonetheless. Not unlike the chill in the air when spring starts to declare itself queen, and just as that touch of winter gives way to life renewing itself again, so too does he bend. 

Again and again. 

“Just how drunk are you planning on getting?” Hunk mumbles from his corner, though he looks pleased enough with Lance’s reaction. If the smile still poking out of the corners of his mouth is any indication. 

“Enough to forget we’re on our way to some planet whose natives may not exactly be happy to see us,” Lance replies while tugging off his jacket. It’s still as long and loose-fitting as his previous one had been, though its olive green has been traded in for a deep-sea blue, sunlit yellow braided around the pocket on his chest and hem of his cuffs. Shiro remembers the moment he had pulled it off the rack at one of the trading posts they frequented, poking at the holes in his old jacket before nodding his head in affirmation at the new one. It had a certain regality to its cut, tapering at the waist before flaring out again. 

Lance had insisted the color made his eyes irresistible and the shape may as well have granted his body the title of First Great Wonder of the Universe. Keith still has to stifle his laughter every time the topic comes up. 

“We owe them a chance,” Shiro supplies. He sinks back into his seat with a creak, catching Keith’s gaze briefly before turning it back to the others.

“We don’t owe anyone anything, Shiro,” Pidge retorts. There’s a sharpness to her words, and again it leaves Shiro wondering when she grew up on them all. “We’re doing this because we decided we were all in on saving the universe.”

“Yeah, so umm. . .aren’t we supposed to be like. . . I don’t know _enjoying_ ourselves tonight?” Hunk flicks his finger at the deck of cards. A shrug follows that act as he looks from one paladin to the other, each in their turn. “You said it yourself, Shiro, we owed ourselves this. Some time to relax. . .so, how about it?”

Shiro realizes he can't argue against that. He starts to laugh then, the sound soft but deeply rooted, and lets his head fall back against his chair. He sets his hands down against the table’s edge as a smile overtakes his lips and the moment sinks in, warmth climbing his frame until he feels like he’s chest-deep in it. 

Suddenly the vastness of the world and all its miseries, all its demands and its triumphs don’t matter. And maybe it’s not about what is owed because the scales are always balanced by the end of it all, and right now. . .right now, it feels like the universe is on an even keel.

“Yeah, let’s play, guys. . .” Shiro says, laughter hinging on his words.

“Okay, but can we play something other than fuck the dealer?” Keith asks with a sigh. He’s thumbing at the edge of the cards, looking at the stack almost regrettably. 

“You only say that because you always get fucked.” Lance sniping his response within the second. He’s got one leg planted on the seat of his chair, his feet as bare as Pidge’s but without all the flickering of toes.

“No, I don’t,” Keith cuts back, eyes narrowing dangerously.

The table creaks in protest as Pidge rolls herself from her seat and over top of it suddenly. Forearms crossed over one another to support her weight, she leans low, a smile spreading over her lips with all the slow reveal of a conspiracy breaking open. “Yeah, you do.”

Keith looks about ready to protest before Shiro raps his knuckles on the table. “Are we playing or not? We need a consensus here.”

“I agree with Keith.” Hunk is pushing up the sleeves of his shirt, the material thin and cottony, a saturated green in hue, and shooting his gaze off to the side like it’ll help him avoid whatever confrontation Lance thinks might be fit for amusement. “I mean. . .I’m not looking to get blackout hammered two days before we supposedly arrive at our next battle destination.”

He pauses, licking his lips before offering the table a hesitant smile. Shiro can see the strain there, not in his eyes or in the smile itself, but in the way the tendons cord tight at his wrists. 

“I don’t know about you all, but I’d kinda like to be able to think straight on my potential last day of existence,” Hunk finishes. 

The blue of Lance’s eyes burns positively electric at those words, a grin, Cheshire Cat in its making, pulling his mouth wide. “All right then. Circle of Death it is.”

Shiro catches the way Keith’s mouth pulls thin, as bloodless as the moon in midwinter and promising all its impending chill.

“Lance, that’s not funny.”

“Oh, give it up, Hunk. If we can’t laugh at our own potential demise, we’re never going to survive.” 

As he speaks, Lance reaches out to grab a bottle of dark liquid from beneath the table. He sets it with a heavy-handed finality dead center before him. 

Hunk is already shaking his head. “Are you trying to kill us?”

“Relax, buddy. It’ll just be a shot.”

“I'm pretty sure you mean just shoot me now,” Hunk groans.

Shiro watches as Keith stretches out his arm and runs his index finger down the bottle’s side. The liquid shimmers in the wake of his touch, glimmering like starlight promising calm on the blackest of nights.

“Just remember,” Lance calls out as he places the cards in a circle around a currently empty shot glass. It’s the clearest glass Shiro has ever seen in his life, letting nothing hide, not even the workings of fate itself. Lance had earned it from a bar four months ago, after nearly choking on a liquor that had bitten his tongue harder than Spirytus could ever dream of doing. “Pulling the last king is guaranteed death. May luck be on your side!”

Keith’s finger drops from the bottle, and there at the bottom where he had last touched it, the silver light within coalesces like a miniature sun. Tightly wound, it glows there for several seconds before it detonates bright as a solar flash then fragments like shattered hope, glittering in pieces until it’s devoured by the navy liquid once more.

****

It happens the way most people envision the world ending - with a sudden, jarring sense of obliteration. None of them any the wiser, and none able to foresee it. It simply ends - BAM! - just like that. And where he had once held this thing in his hands, a heart or something like it, there is now nothing.

The battle around them had all but quieted, a dying roar from a once great beast with a few holdouts still pocketed away in the surrounding forest. They are the shuddering breaths as an end takes hold, sucking out life and a will to fight the same way a black hole swallows the remnants of a shattered star. Piece by piece they fall to nothing. Piece by piece, Shiro sees calm reclaiming a planet too long soaked in war. 

He thinks that is where it went wrong - assuming peace is the inevitable end at a battle’s death. Keith had been standing near the gate to the compound they had been defending, its walls looming behind him, throwing shadow out across an already shadow-steeped land. Red was just inside those walls, guardian of their efforts and the civilians too weak, injured or simply scared to fight. 

Shiro doesn’t blame them - the ones who couldn’t find courage in their veins.

He blames himself for not seeing the possibility sooner. 

Keith drops to the ground with all the suddenness of a lightning strike, all the weight of a thunderclap. And just like that, Shiro finds his skies clouded in darkness. Something is ringing in his ears. There’s movement to his left, and with only a glance to verify the target, he aims and shoots. 

Another body drops to the ground, but Shiro doesn’t hear that one. He only hears that soul-rending silence echoing in his ears as he takes off towards Keith’s location. He knows he’s shouting though; he can feel his jaw muscles working, his throat burning. His lips know Keith’s name as intimately as they know Keith himself. He doesn’t need to hear it to know the letters pulling themselves together over his tongue.

He doesn’t need to hear. 

But there remains that incessant ringing stinging at his ears, drilling a hole right into his head. 

The world, Shiro realizes, doesn’t end with a bang or a whimper. It ends with a heart collapsing against your ribs and your thoughts drowning in a fear-steeped black. 

It ends when all you have left is the blood running itself white in your veins while everything you have ever loved runs itself red across the ground.

When he reaches Keith’s side, Shiro knows there is no coming back from this. There’s no subtle rise or fall of his chest, no minute movements behind eyelids. There is only the part of Keith’s lips, and the blood bright as a desert rose across his temples. 

He loves me.

His throat constricts around a sob, choking the very life out of it. Bringing his hand up to press against his mouth, Shiro drops to his knees. 

There’s no sound. But there is blood, and there is an ending, and Shiro thinks himself a fool to believe that peace would ever sit there waiting patiently at the end of his battles.

****

You can set your life to the rhythm of a breath as it causes a chest to rise and fall. Or so Shiro thinks at least. Steady and measured, each inhale and every exhale quietly encourages a world to persist. It’s moments like this that define it all, how tenacious a heart can be.

How utterly beautiful an existence can burn.

He’s been awake for over an hour now, legs tucked beneath the sheets and Keith buried alongside them, his head resting on Shiro’s right thigh. Over and over, he threads his fingers through Keith’s hair, brushing them away from his temple while he studies the slight part of Keith’s lips. He watches the dark strands tumble over one another when he runs them too far to the left and how the slight curl that always claims Keith’s hair after a shower forces them to bounce back into some semblance of alignment. 

He imagines it’s the same way the constellations are tethered together, stringing through the mind’s needle and stitching patterns out of the stars until they are all you know and see. Try to force them out of their set designs, and they inevitably fall right back into the spaces they were meant to be. 

His fingers work their way down to the back of Keith’s neck, where the hair is shorter now than it was several months ago. He smoothes out a few wayward strands, then sets to sketching patterns over his skin. Like long forgotten hieroglyphics, his mind tries to make sense of the messages his fingers are tracing, but all he comes away with is a quiet sense of awe for what is just beneath his touch. 

Keith begins to stir. It starts with his toes, curling in against Shiro’s ankle, then his fingers spreading wide only to furl in against his palms like petals shrinking from the moon’s gaze. He stretches out his neck and lips part for a small sigh. Eyes are the last to relinquish sleep, their lids fluttering open in the dazed manner of those still half-lost to their dreams.

Shiro pinpoints the exact moment Keith realizes he’s in bed and not cold in a grave.

“Is this what it was like for you?” he asks quietly, his fingers back to running lines through Keith’s hair.

Confusion passes dark and uncertain through Keith’s gaze as he looks up at Shiro. He licks at his lips, voice waiting to be found, and carefully nods his head.

“Imagine not waking up to you, Shiro. I had to tell myself it was all a dream. . .”

“I’m sorry, Keith.”

And he is, genuinely so.

Keith reaches up then, running his fingertips along Shiro’s jaw until lips set to capture them, kissing each finger in turn.

“What happened. . .?”

Shiro starts shaking his head as if that alone could dislodge the memory and dump it into the fires of forgetting. He kisses Keith’s fingertips again, then moves to set one more firmly against the base of his palm. Keith presses his hand against Shiro’s cheek, and it’s only then that Shiro allows himself to speak, lets his eyes fall shut. 

The words are sharp as broken glass, the sort dropped when shock hits the room, and everything comes falling from on high. They leave a right mess of his throat, every bit of it feeling as raw as fledgling emotions tend to be. He has always contemplated death - his, not Keith’s. Trying to embrace someone else’s mortality is no different from shaking hands with Death himself. It’s a cold, chilling affair that puts a shiver straight through your soul and makes your heart cling to every scrap of life pumping right through it.

“A head shot,” Shiro murmurs. He opens his eyes to the sight of Keith staring wordlessly up at him. What he sees is a look drinking up every second, shying away from nothing. Unafraid of drowning. “I had been trailing another Galra through the outskirts of the forest, but there was another one waiting. Watching the entrance, I assume. The moment I moved out of range. . .you had your back turned. . .”

“I was arguing with one of the villagers. He didn’t want to go into the compound, kept saying it was cursed land and that’s why the Galra built there. . .” Keith picks up quietly.

It feels like a sandstorm has kicked up in his chest, pelting his heart and filling his lungs with a suffocating number of tiny grains. All of them turning the very act of breathing into a fine art, shooting a delicate pain into every inhale.

“I couldn’t get there fast enough,” Shiro exhales harshly. When he looks down at Keith, his vision is blurred and burning. Seconds later, the world goes dark as he shuts his eyes again and leans his forehead down against Keith’s. And for once, the blackout of being turns into a soul-saving comfort, so great is his grief not even the monsters of his memories dare to take any steps forward.

Grief, he realizes, is sacred ground. There is nothing within him that would ever try to desecrate it. It’s the most honest outpouring of a soul, right there next to absolute love. Even the horrors that live within him fear to tread in its territory once it has been claimed, and it claims without remorse, without thought. When grief first sweeps in, it consumes and consumes until nothing else exists but its bulk, taking up residence within heart and mind alike. This heavy, pressing thing that drains the color from the world.

But Keith is like fire. He flares bright red and battle-tested orange. Shiro feels that flame spark over his lips, and his own part for a silent sob into that kiss. He has lost much in this world, but never Keith.

Not until just then. 

Perhaps still in another few hours. 

Keith pulls himself up from the bed then, pressing both his hands to Shiro’s face as he climbs into his lap. He kisses him again, hard and fierce as if searing his love right onto Shiro’s tongue. Shiro imagines it just like that so that every time he speaks, he’ll taste Keith. There will be no part of him that does not know him, no words that slip over his lips that have not tasted of Keith either. Every breath out, every inhale filling his lungs - all of it will have known the man who holds his heart dearer than any other. 

Hands slip up along Keith’s bare back, pausing only to reacquaint themselves with the scars Shiro had memorized days after their making. They stop at the base of Keith’s neck, where fingers slip into his hairline and nails scrape along his scalp.

When Shiro opens his eyes, it’s to Keith staring down at him, lips slightly ajar. There’s a flicker of desperation in his gaze, a flash of that need to drive home that he is here, he is alive, and he is Shiro’s alone. The part of his lips is tempting; the lavender of his eyes enticing. All of it tells Shiro they have time. 

“Stay in Red, Keith,” Shiro murmurs as Keith’s fingers push back his hair and palms press against his temples. 

“I’m not dying today, Shiro. . .”

****

The castle is abuzz with action, as it tended to be now before their battles. Half of Marmora is routinely onboard at any given time, and filtering between them, a flurry of diplomats and allied military advisers, each offering aid or looking to make their case for one strategy or target over another.

Shiro had come to realize over the years that their agendas are nothing more than political chameleons - some hide in plain sight, while you catch others as they’re trying to shed one policy for another. Everyone had one, and not everyone adhered to the same one. They all wanted peace, that much has never been up for debate, but the how’s and why’s, the extent to which they should go to secure said peace are sources of endless head-butting and ruffled feathers. 

One adviser argues for annihilation, a quick and swift end to the Galra as fitting as they deserve. Another demands his planet’s citizens are salvaged next. And still a third one petitions for more skilled soldiers to bolster his own standing army. 

As if they simply manufacture such things as infantry, complete with requisite skill sets, from the castle’s halls itself. 

And everyone. . .everyone wants Voltron. Or at least a Lion or two.

Because the world will be saved by a giant mechanical beast, and not the souls still calling the universe a home worth saving.

The central meeting room is blissfully quiet, though not devoid of tension. Shiro has a map of their current coordinates projected over the center of the table. He pinches his index finger and thumb together over a nearby planet, then shoots them apart to reveal a close-up of its surface. Thick forests cover the majority of the area he has focused in on save for one large compound sitting at the left of the projection. Gray rain-stained walls encircle it, nearly two stories in height, though they’re eclipsed by the buildings held within its boundaries. At the center of the compound, a tall, dark spire looks ready to puncture the sky. 

Across the table, Keith’s mouth sets in a firm line, his gaze briefly meeting Shiro’s before he tips his head to listen as Lance starts whispering to him.

“I know we talked about this before, but I’m having Keith stay in the Red Lion during this one.”

Sounds drift over the table, the rustle of clothing intermingling with cleared throats and uneasy murmurings. Shiro scans the small crowd, and seeing no immediate signs of rebuttal, continues, “I’m sending him out with Pidge and Kolivan’s team instead. Hunk, you’re going to take watch over the compound. Your Lion is our tank. She’ll be able to provide the necessary shelter, and if needed you can activate further defenses. . .”

The murmurings start to rise, like the first breaking of earth as fingers push through seeking freedom from a grave too early dug. Shiro places both hands on the table, fingers spread wide, his weight evenly distributed over their tips as he leans forward.

“Listen, I know this isn’t what we planned on initially - “

“Yeah, that’s just it, Shiro,” Lance cuts in with a wave of his hand. His other arm is still tucked over his chest, its hand buried in the shadows of his jacket. “We haven’t discussed this. That’s why we’re here right now. To figure this out. . .”

There’s bemusement sitting in his smile, and it touches the blue of his eyes just enough for Shiro to take it all as truth. Beside him, Keith’s eyes have filled with alarm, and they’re searching Shiro’s for answers even as he’s shaking his head.

“We talked about this just the other day. We were standing right here. . .” Keith starts, his words harsh, lit with the first flames of panic. Or maybe it’s incredulity. Like standing there with the puzzle pieces in your hand only to watch as the picture pulls itself together without your help at all, and you realize everything you’re holding in your grasp is of no real worth. It was never needed to complete the whole. “Lance, you told me you were gonna need at least thirty minutes before launch to clear out breakfast! I even laughed at that! I mean, I don’t know why, but I did. . .”

“Keith, buddy? I can call you that, right? We’ve known each other like way too long so whatever, fuck it. . .” Lance settles a hand on Keith’s shoulder with all the heavy finality of truth coming home to roost. His fingers curl in, lightly scrunching up the black material of Keith’s shirt. A gentle, consoling squeeze. “I don’t know what mind-melding tricks your alien blood gives you because I am going to need thirty at least, but I didn’t tell you that today.”

“I didn’t mind-meld with you, Lance,” Keith cuts back with a sharp shrug of his shoulder. The hand settled there flies away, fingers spread and placating, as Lance takes a step back. “Shiro, say something! You know I’m right!”

He did remember the remark, and the laugh Keith had given had been accompanied by a vaguely disgusted smile. It had been a rather valiant effort on Keith’s behalf to keep his further comments tied down to his tongue, Shiro had thought. Though, Pidge had ultimately been the one to salvage them all with a flatly expelled _gross!_ as she climbed onto a chair and started poking at the holographic planets with her stylet. The planets moved accordingly, sliding out of the way, and as the galaxy had opened up before them once more, Allura had pulled her hand from her face, and the smirk had dropped from Kolivan’s lips. 

It had been back to business, with a much different course of action coalescing around them. Experience can do a lot to decimate the idea of best-laid plans. 

His gaze drops down to the table, and for a moment, Shiro watches as the light dripping from the projection above shimmers over its crystalline surface. It’s as though someone had miniaturized the Aurora Borealis, green wavering over the sky’s shadows, curving around the white of clouds and staining starlight. All of it spawning a quiet sense of awe within him. 

None of them knew. 

And maybe, if he hadn’t spent his time trying to reason out the possibilities within his own head and had actually spoken to them, one or any, then maybe he wouldn’t be standing here without the answers he needs for Keith. Instead, Shiro had bottled away that first moment as a bad dream, another nightmare to sit crouched among the many that haunt his skull, and he had trudged forward with the same steel-nerved resolve needed to lead a war. 

He hasn’t forgotten his own death, but he has envisioned his own so many times that it has become no different than a rancher recounting the scars on his hands - a thoughtless once-over, so routine as to be considered part of the job. But waking up this morning. . .

Shiro brings his gaze to meet Keith’s across the table and gives him the smallest shake of his head.

“We’ll discuss this part later, all right? For now, we need to focus on the battle we’re about to wage.”

Keith holds his gaze across the table, his words simmering in the violet of his eyes. He says nothing more, however, but Shiro can see it. Like a prophecy delivered by fire, their conversation-to-be crackles and sparks between them, waiting to be made their inevitable reality.

****

“What was that back there?”

There had been little fuss over the general plan, but Shiro realizes that, in part, had been due to the fact that there is very little to argue over. Newly presented ideas when standing on a solid foundation of the tried-and-usually-true typically stir little debate. It’s only when things go wrong that the questions start surfacing. But, Shiro has the tried part of this plan down, having seen for himself what another route would lead to in another day's time. He just hadn’t offered up the details behind the decision made.

But what leader would? What _good_ leader would, is what he wants to think, but veteran is the more apt term. 

Perhaps that isn’t being fair. Shiro knows that’s also a part of war, where fairness is about as common a concept as humans being legitimate universal rulers. He sets his lips with grim determination when Keith pulls him away from the desk to look at him. Hand still lingering over his forearm, Keith’s expression shifts in one lightning split second, from indignant sulking to cautious concern. And Shiro can imagine the thoughts it took to move him like that.

Anger boils off rather quickly when grief bears in cold and heavy once again.

Keith lifts his hand and brings it to Shiro’s cheek, the touch itself the question - _will you be okay?_

A smile springs to his lips at that. Shiro gives himself one last indulgence, leaning into that touch and letting the weight of him be the reassurance Keith needs.

“They don’t know, Keith.”

He nods at those words. Shiro watches as Keith turns over that information in his mind, feeling along the edges of its angles, brushing off the dirt from its underside in the hope some ancient text might be inscribed somewhere, and with a little deciphering, would give them the ever elusive answers for their current existence. Shiro sees the moment Keith comes to the same realization he had while leaning over the table. His furrowed brow relaxes, lips parting ever so slightly. The fingers resting against his cheek curl in, and seeing nothing to hold onto, slip to the edge of Shiro’s jaw.

“We couldn’t give them an explanation.”

This time, Shiro nods, slow and careful, afraid of dislodging Keith’s touch. 

“And that wasn’t the time to be shoveling that information over them,” Keith continues, quiet and solemn.

“We don’t even know if it will happen again.”

“And if it does, Shiro?”

“The battle first, Keith. We have to survive this one before we start thinking of anything further.”

Arms encircle his neck. Keith settles his forehead against Shiro’s chest, and the simple act of it has the breath fleeing from his lungs. A stillness settles over him, then digs down into him where he can feel its hands wrapping around his heart and soul, grip pulsing tight and tighter still, until both aspects of him start merging into one quiet storm of being. 

“I’m not dying today, Takashi.” A muffled whisper against his shoulder. “I’m not dying.”


	4. Three

Shiro has fallen. He is there, he is right there, and Keith can’t do anything. 

He knows his voice is running itself hoarse over the distance to get to him. He knows that there is a swarm of Galra sentinels rapidly filling in the space between him and Shiro’s body. He knows that there is a Galra warship preparing itself for a planet’s decimation.

And somewhere, deep inside the darkness surging to riot within his heart, Keith knows that the arms wrapped tight as Mercy’s jaw around his waist are the reason he is still alive. 

“Kolivan, let me go!”

Silence falls heavy from the air around them. Keith turns and launches a fist straight at Kolivan’s face, and within seconds, finds himself unceremoniously hoisted over a shoulder.

“Put me down! We’re not leaving him. . .we’re not. . .”

There are so many ways a voice can break, but Keith has never known his to shatter over a desperation already bleeding itself dry within his veins. 

Within seconds, Shiro’s body starts to grow ever further from him. Keith throws an elbow into the back of Kolivan’s head, earning him a low growl that only infuriates him further. 

They’re leaving him.

They’re leaving him.

“We’re not leaving him,” Keith cries out, a sob tearing into his words.

“You’re the only one who can get the Black Lion off this planet before they destroy it.”

They are going to leave him. 

Something crawls into Keith’s heart then, sets its rows and rows of razor-teeth to those bright red walls still pulsing with every beat, and starts eating through tissue and emotion alike. He is bleeding out, and there is no sound to accompany it, no crimson splatter to signify the life draining out of him.

There is nothing but a swarm of bodies he calls the enemy, growing smaller and smaller as the distance between him and them grows larger and larger, and a hollow ache chewing right through his chest. He doesn’t know how he’s still breathing, that thing ate out his lungs after devouring his heart, and those cries scalding the air? They’re not his. They can’t be. Because Keith swears there’s nothing left in him. Instead, those better parts of him are standing there, watching the enemy converge on Shiro’s prostrate form. 

They’ll take those parts too. 

Keith is leaving them behind.

***

“You’re in here an awful lot lately.”

The conference room has become home-away-from-home. It’s the spot Keith could reliably find Shiro outside of their bedroom. His bedroom, honestly speaking, but the designation of yours and mine, here and there always got a little muddled when lives started to intertwine. And his and Shiro’s had become as inseparable as wisteria and morning glory, working over the latticework of their existence until all that is seen are the vibrant bursts of color, green twisting over green and bringing two lives together into one. Ever since this. . .thing had started, where time warps itself like some tortured melody delivering them to Death and them calling them back from the Underworld for a second chance, Shiro has spent more and more time mulling over plans and potentials. 

All the ways a life could go wrong, a heart could stop beating.

Those things are as infinite as the universe itself and just as mysterious at times.

Keith believes in planning, to a degree. He believes that there is a certain prudence that needed to be taken in waging a war that had more moving parts than any of Pidge’s mechanical creations. He believes that certain actions needed to be regarded first, spun about and set back down after laying a critical eye to all their bits and pieces, but unlike Shiro, he doesn’t think it spells out every potential a battle could take. And he knows that Shiro knows this too because he fights like that part of war has been carved into his bones, etched for every win in the Arena, every sacrifice made after that. 

But caution is Shiro’s modi operandi. 

He understands this. It’s why the conference rooms became the first thing he searched, and there, more often than not, he would find Shiro staring at the projections of various galaxies, studying each distress signal pulsing in bright red from one planet or another. Sometimes, he asks Keith for his thoughts. Because this morning, the chancellor of Wadi had insisted on aid for their neighboring planet of Akis; they feared invasion next, though what had their planet to offer during the dry season other than a people already run thin by bare resources? But Allura had promised the princess Erato help in dislodging a rebel force intent on ingratiating themselves with the Galra. She had done so just last week, which is to say a week before Akis even came into the picture.

The lists of pledges made are as long as sunbeams and just as impossible to hold, but still, they keep cascading down. 

Tonight, however, Shiro is silent. He’s stripped down out of his coat, the militarized one cut in Altean fashion complete with Altean white with a nod to Shiro’s preference for black in the thick cording that ran down its seams and the collar. The buttons had been laser-cut with the Black Lion’s insignia etched over their centers and polished to a gleaming starstruck silver. Keith had hated to admit it looked good, but it had looked. . .really good. It’s left Shiro with only the black undershirt, as crisp and clean as the rest of him tended to be when he’s been shuttled from one meeting to another, and the thigh-tight pants with their accenting white line running down the outside of his legs only to disappear into his boots. Keith had more readily admitted to liking the pants.

But that was a personal matter.

Shiro offers him a smile at those words, pulling one of his arms free from where it had been folded against his chest and gesturing to the map.

“Sometimes, I feel like I’m seeing this thing for the first time. . .”

The smile is a wry one, and it has Keith’s heart aching quietly in his chest. As unobtrusive but present an ache as a bruise punched over his skin, forgotten until touch reminded you it existed. 

Shiro’s smile reminds him of a lot of things.

“Maybe you’ve been staring at it for too long. You always come here. . .after every reset,” Keith says. He walks over to where Shiro is standing, thinking a change in perspective might let him see the points Shiro is struggling to connect. Nothing is different. Whether from the front or the back, upside down or right side up, all Keith sees is the same galaxy they’ve been staring at for these last few months. A sudden flurry of distress signals had flared up in this quadrant, and they had worked diligently to put each fire out at Kolivan’s urging. 

Keith understood there had been something worthwhile in saving these planets and their inhabitants, but saying that felt cheap in the grand scheme of things. A lot of things sound like that when the universe is delivering shit to doorsteps instead of a splash of sunshine and better days, and all you have are words constructed from paper that are expected to stand up to force like brick and mortar could. Talk might buy you time and hope, but it doesn’t have the same permanence as action. 

At some point, someone is going to look for answers and say something could have been done sooner and better, and maybe if that someone had done that something, there’d be a whole lot more left in the universe with life still singing it their veins than graves filling with dirt and broken dreams. 

Shiro reaches out then and circles his index finger around a scattering of planets in the far left corner.

“We haven’t gotten there yet. . .” he points out, brow drawn together like he’s trying to reel in a thought from the farthest depths of his headspace. Carefully, steadily, hoping the line doesn’t snap before he can pull it free. “But I keep feeling like I’m missing something, and then I start to think maybe I can’t trust my own memory. What if we’re losing bits of that every time we come back. . .”

It’s not a question, but Keith hears it nonetheless. He takes a step closer to Shiro, letting his shoulder rest against his upper arm and tips his head against Shiro’s shoulder. The screen looks the same to him. Mostly at least.

“Was there another distress signal in that area?” he asks after a moment. 

The feeling of something missing starts eating at him too, and he doesn’t know if it’s Shiro’s words burrowing into him or if something truly has evaporated from their timeline.

“I don’t think so. . .but I don’t know,” Shiro murmurs. He pulls his arm back, folding it once more over his chest, and bumps his hip against Keith’s. “Maybe I’m getting old.”

“You are getting old, Shiro,” Keith cuts back, a smile threatening to break up his confusion over the map. “But you’re not that old. Definitely not old enough to be forgetting vital shit about the universe we’re still trying to save.”

Shiro gives a soft snort at that, bumping Keith’s hip again with his own. His gaze gravitates towards the corner in question, where three planets cluster together, each outlined in red to signify their current Galra occupation. The circle around them pulses, steady as a beating a heart, and Keith knows that what Shiro sees is not the life still left in them but the distress causing them to call out. It’s inevitable, but much like an alarm left to blare for too long or a stake driven through a hand, the effectiveness of its pain fizzles out over time. He had talked about it once, how he feels it swimming somewhere inside of his head, and if he’s jarred in just the right way, the pain wakes up and starts screaming all over for release. 

The fatigue of constantly fighting. Good intentions and dreamer’s ideals don’t always save you from it, and that’s when you get into the real muck of it. Pulling your legs one after the other through the knee-high mud and blood of your own thoughts and actions, traversing the circuitous nature of battle, leaping from one to the other, all hinging on the hope that this one is bringing you ever closer to the end.

Or at least letting you keep your own life for another day.

Some days, that’s all you get.

And for some, that’s too much to carry.

Keith knows that Shiro knows this better than most, though, and after so many years, the other Paladins have practically caught up to him in that regard. Shiro still wonders how Keith maintains that fire though, sparking brightest when he feels the darkness consuming all things good and reasonable in his world. They plot. They plan. They fight again. And some days, the night growls deep and threatening, and all his thoughts go spilling out across the floor of his mind, and the screaming starts again. 

But Allura insists they are winning this war. Keith believes it most days when he looks at the lists of planets recovered versus the ones still calling for help.

He watches as Shiro’s gaze jumps from the trio of planets to the others nearby. The next is a rather sizable one, it’s surface thick with flora and fauna, mimicking the jungles of Earth only their trees are taller and their canopies rainbow-colored. At night, the whole forest shrinks as leaves and flowers fold in on themselves, cocooning their colors from the darkness. There’s no moon to offer light to this world, so when the sun sets, black devours the sky. He may not have been able to see his own hand before his face the first time he had experienced it, but he had certainly felt his heart.

Shiro reaches out again and zooms in on the planet. With a flick of his finger, he turns the whole planet dark and stares intently as the forest collapses before them both, leaving only the bare skeletons of tree branches and vines crawling like sinew between them.

It’s never ceased to amaze Keith, on that cosmic-dust integration of all being level, how a forest itself is nothing more than one massive organism, teeming with life and danger, the everyday struggles of survival.

“I’ve made a lot of calls in my life. . .” Shiro begins, his eyes still locked on the projection. For a moment, Keith wonders if Shiro’s words have dismantled themselves somewhere in his throat because suddenly it’s like can’t find the rest of that thought. Shiro licks at his lips and tries to smile. Starts again. “A lot of calls. . . but that last one. . .”

He shakes his head and unfolds his other arm, then reaches out to grip the back of a chair with both hands. 

“I thought I wouldn’t sleep that night, but at some point, I must have because I woke up and there you were, sleeping beside me. But I had been so convinced that after what I did. . .why would I ever get you back?”

Dropping his head, Shiro shifts his weight forward, fingers curling tight enough for knuckles to blanch. The chair groans under the sudden pressure then gives a second later and scoots a little further under the table.

“You left me.”

The words drop from Keith’s mouth with the sort of quiet afforded only by surprise. It happens when realization strikes the center of the heart and robs the voice of all its power, yet in doing so gives words far more weight. 

Syllables define truth and whispers demand listening. Keith knows Shiro had heard him because his arms go rigid, like nails just waiting for consequence to hammer them into the ground; his fingers bite in harsher still over the sleek white edge of the chair. It’s that line that Keith finds himself staring at, the way the colors from the projection above shimmer over its surface, polished like opal. Caught there between the iron-grip of Shiro’s hands, the idea that something so beautiful would still persist, oblivious to them all, is strangely gutting.

It doesn’t matter that his heart feels like it just got crushed beneath a press, emotion squeezed out of it like juice from an orange’s flesh. It doesn’t matter that he knows there is more to this, that Shiro would never make a decision like that lightly. 

It doesn’t matter that he can see Shiro bleeding out before him because of him and how the words send little earthquakes through his lips. Every syllable spoken is a devastation to heart and mind.

“I could have lost the entire team. . .I know you wouldn’t have made that choice either. Not if it meant losing something greater.”

This is the natural destruction of loving another, as inherent in the act as a cry is to an infant seconds after its birth. Wars are fought in a million different ways, and hearts are broken just the same, and still, he loves, and still, he fights. 

Keith brings his hand up to his mouth, clasping it over it lightly. Taking a step away from Shiro’s side, he examines the man as he stands there, hunched over the chair, his arms as rigid as ever, just waiting to absorb the blows to come. Defeat has already taken him, and Keith knows there is nothing he could do or say that would ever hit Shiro as hard or deep as what Shiro has already done to himself. 

He’s standing in a grave already. Shiro’s just waiting for Keith to start shoveling in the dirt.

The breath that slips between his fingers is a shuddering one. Turning his gaze from the sight, Keith draws in an equally shuddering breath. 

Shiro had left him behind. 

“I wanted to go back for you. . .”

A sob fills the room. Then, there is nothing. Just an aching silence, seated at the table, waiting for some resolution to come. It takes a moment for Keith to recognize the sob had been stained with his own voice and not Shiro’s, and when the realization hits, another follows in its wake. Shiro cringes; his fingers go bloodless in their grip.

The colors start to blur over the white of the chair, bleeding into paling versions of themselves yet not entirely ruined. 

Keith still thinks the sight is impossibly beautiful.

“I love you, Shiro.”

A single statement that comes out the same way a heart is offered, whole and complete and dripping crimson from the effort it takes to give so much of yourself.

“I love you. . .I do. . .” Keith continues, hand dropping from his mouth to gesture around them. He doesn’t touch Shiro though. 

He can’t. 

Just like the moon gets no choice in how the sun helps it shine. Or how fire still needs oxygen to breathe, or how you can’t help falling for someone because they somehow make you feel like home. Because he makes him feel like the world will be okay even when every battle threatens to destroy the very peace he brings to his life. 

Can’t deny Shiro. Can’t deny his own heart.

He just can’t.

“But right now, I can’t be here with you.”

***

Pidge’s workroom is something of an. . .experience. A certain sort of ‘come to Jesus’ moment as he works his way around piles of notebooks, written in more languages than Keith can count on his fingers and toes and teeth combined. All while praying he doesn’t inadvertently crush some minuscule robotic project that might one day save lives or blow a lot of shit up. It tended to be a coin toss on those when it came to Pidge, and in either case, she remains mind-numbingly ecstatic over both prospects.

Life and death. _Two sides of the same coin, Keith._

She liked to remind him of that point from time to time, like right now. He’s currently sprawled out in the center of her circle of doom - his term, not hers - with his head nestled over her right thigh. She’s got one hand working calculations over a floating lime green keyboard while the other pokes relentlessly at his cheek. Her index finger narrowly misses his eye on the next attempt.

“I thought I was your favorite Paladin,” Keith laments, just a touch petulant. Because Pidge allows him those moments, especially after he pulled her out of a pit festering with inch-long radioactive orange spiders that phosphoresced when agitated. Honestly speaking, they had all been rather happy to leave that particular planet.

She mumbles something around the stylet held in her mouth.

Keith flicks his finger against her calf. “English. . .or Altean. . .something I can understand at least.”

“How about idiot?” Pidge mutters, letting the writing utensil drop from her lips to clatter over several papers scattered to her left. 

“That’s Lance’s specialty.”

She snorts at that, though she has enough love for their Blue Paladin to throw him a withering glance in its wake. “And you’ve been gravely misled if you think _you_ are my favorite Paladin.”

“It’s not Hunk, is it?” Keith asks. He pushes himself up from her lap, giving his hair a good ruffle with his hand though he knows it’ll be about as effective as combing the ocean’s waves and expecting things to line up in perfect synch. It’s a valiant effort though, and Pidge gives him a questioning quirk of her eyebrow for the attempt.

“Nope, though he came pretty close with those nachos.”

“Those were actually. . .pretty amazing.”

“Epic, Keith. They weren’t just _amazing_. They were epic, the thing of legends and constellations.” Pidge draws her legs together then, crisscrossing them and pulling the keyboard over her thighs. It hovers there, throwing a pale digital-coded green over her skin. She’s forsaken the tights and taken up her three-sizes-too-big gray jacket, with a hood large enough for her to bury herself and every thought she’s ever had inside of it. She’s currently got it flicked behind her, where it practically consumes her back. 

Keith reaches out to tug at it. “But not your favorite.”

“No. That would be Rovers II and III.”

She doesn’t even look at him as she says it, but Keith can see the grin sliding ruthless over her lips.

“They’re not Paladins.”

“They’re extensions of myself.”

“So, you are your favorite Paladin.” He deadpans the sentence, letting his expression fall soul-extricating flat as he stares at her.

Pidge rolls her head back and blinks at him through her glasses. “Ummm, have you seen how badass Green has been lately?”

He starts laughing at that, the sound as quiet as moonlight hitting lake water with the same touch of solemnity to it. It’s the smile he knows that doesn’t quite reach his eyes and the subdued sound that gets Pidge’s attention. Or, perhaps better put, refocuses her attention. She had asked him, in that offhand probing sort of way when he had first walked in, waltzing around her papers with precise steps and letting that distract him from his reasons for being here.

_I’d say the cat dragged in something but Red isn’t small enough to get down here._

Though being down here generally shoves one of his problems onto center stage, whether he cares for it or not. But Keith also knows that in coming down here and eating up her time while she’s working is asking for it to happen. She has patience, but it’s not infinite. He doesn’t get to roll around in her good graces, expecting seconds to trudge on endlessly without reminding him of their costs. 

Time is, perhaps, the most expensive thing in the universe. People burn themselves out just to have a little more of it before they’re too decrepit to grab it by the reins and direct a little of it for themselves. 

The problem is that Keith’s idea of time has been cut down and swallowed whole, then regurgitated up along with all the mess of emotions that went down with it. Time isn’t reliable any more - it doesn’t end when it should, but hiccups and stutters as it stumbles into the future. It regenerates like a limb that once gone should have never returned, science and logic tell him this, and with it comes all the pain of re-emerging into this life that he has made. 

He doesn’t mind the hurt. He doesn’t. How could he hate second chances? Or the third or fourth. . .? 

“Shiro said he had left me the last time. . .”

Pidge scrunches her nose at that, her gaze still fixed on the screen floating just above her keyboard now. 

“He had wanted to go back.”

“Shiro would never leave you if he had a real choice in the matter.”

“There’s always a choice, Pidge.”

“Doesn’t mean you have to like your options though.” She shoves the keyboard away from her. Keith watches as it floats off into space only to cut in and out of visibility, like a transmission being dashed apart by static, until it disappears entirely. With an exhale and a rub over her nose with the palm of her hand, Pidge spins around on her ass and faces him completely. “You know this better than any of us, and we all know it pretty well by now. War is shit. We like to think we get to make these grand sweeping choices that bring about the good in the world, but the truth is, we do it by smearing our hands and our hearts with blood that isn’t our own.”

Her mouth purses tight for a moment. Keith knows that look - she’s studying him like one of her problems, trying to figure out how to break down and reformat some part of the human experience into something they can both understand. 

“Did he say what the choice was?”

He drops his gaze at that question and fixates on the place where his fingers had been plucking relentlessly at the frayed edges of his pants. The fabric itself is black, skin-tight but easy to move in, but as it starts to unravel, he can see the gray woven into it. Piece by piece, it pulls apart until he hits a place where it’s been threaded tightly together, and he can’t work it loose any further.

“He said he would have lost everyone else if he hadn’t. . .”

Pidge hums at that. She scoots over then, suddenly, and wraps her arms around him. She’s more like a blanket, her limbs a mere skeletal frame for draping her jacket over, but she is warm. Settling her chin on his shoulder, she looks out at the space before them both. 

“You would have done the same thing,” she murmurs gently. “Hated yourself for it, but you would have done it.”

Keith nods at that. He wants to say something in return, but he can’t seem to do that either. The words have tangled up with another sob in his throat, and he’s reluctant to let that out again. It had been bad enough that morning, a knife he dug into his own chest really, and now he’s afraid that in pulling it out, he’ll be leaving a bloody mess all over the floor. 

“Don’t let the big guy hate himself too much for it either. He does that enough as it is with things. . .”

A grunt is managed for that. He works a few words around the ball of emotion in his throat, teasing them out until he can taste them on his tongue. Then, he licks at his lower lip, scrapes his teeth over it next, and leans his head against hers.

“You know I love him, right. . .”

She laughs. And it’s warm and quiet and completely for him. “We all know you love him, Keith.” Her grip around him tightens until he feels her elbows digging into his ribs. “Just keep on loving him. . .God knows the universe needs more of that.”

The door slides open then with a solid, all-business _swoosh_. Keith brings a hand up to place over both of Pidge’s, where she’s planted them against his chest. They don’t bother to move, only blink up owlishly at the intrusion in unison. Slav stops the moment he sees them, eyebrow lifting delicately as if trying to pick the most correct response to this situation out of his million and then some predictions. 

His expression flattens a little, and Keith recognizes it as settling on an option.

“Do I need to give you another moment? This is bonding, yes?”

Pidge snorts right into Keith’s ear, and this time when Keith tries to choke down his words, it’s because of the laughter threatening to obliterate them. 

“We’re good, Slav,” Pidge answers as she plucks herself from Keith’s side. She gives him a teasing ruffle through his hair, yawning wide, then crawls over to where she had sent her keyboard into oblivion. It pops back into existence without a sound.

“Oh, all right then.” A dismissal of an answer as Slav slinks his way through the workroom, several folders tucked tightly to his chest. 

Keith watches him for a moment, lips still harboring a smile. It takes shelter in the corners of his mouth, small but far more genuine than his earlier attempts had been. Both Pidge and Slav had been told about their situation, called into the conference room late one night after Shiro had explained things to Allura and Kolivan first. It had taken time for the information to be digested, then disseminated appropriately, and Keith, though frustrated at their lack of initial understanding, understood it himself. Because he had watched Shiro struggle that first time with the idea, needing more than just moments to decompress what had happened and figure out how it fit into his reality.

A reality that had no logical basis to define it, but had been made of science fiction and dreams. 

And he hadn’t been able to explain it himself, how it had felt _real_. Not just a glossing of thoughts that may have been but got wiped away by more pressing matters, leaving what the world determined as fact sitting cold and undeniable beneath. Just as he had felt the warmth of Pidge through his shirt and his own heart breathing through every pulse, he had felt the truth of what had happened to them. 

It had been a severing of a thread, ends dropping down into the black abyss of loss, and when he had woken that morning, and every reset morning since, he had felt that ending acutely. Like the world had taken the very knife Fate had severed that string with and used it to etch those memories into his bones. And maybe one day when he’s nothing more than legend and history fodder, someone might excavate his remains and see the stories carved irrefutably there. 

This is how a life ends. This is how it begins. This is how it persisted. How it ended again. And here the moment when a heart remembered how to beat.

“Slav?”

At the call of his name, Slav turns from the console he had taken to roosting at and tips his head to the side. 

“Are they really out there?” Keith asks, once again back to plucking at the frayed edges of his pants. “Those alternate realities you always talk about?”

Slav seems to consider the question for a moment. Not for any uncertainty in his actual answer than in what was actually being asked. “Of course they are, Keith! They are infinite, just like the soul.”

“The soul, huh?” A smile jumps to his lips at that, tenuous as if built on sand already slipping through an hourglass. Impossible to hold onto without losing it to the flow of time. Flicking his gaze towards Slav, which means blatantly ignoring the look Pidge is aiming at him, Keith continues, “Is it possible for something like that to get. . .lost? Even a part of it?”

“Why not?” Slav replies with a flourish of fingers, two sets of his hands illuminating the potential while the other two continue to plug in numbers over the console. He tips his head back and looks at Keith. “What is the soul but the energy the universe has granted you? It is your own, yet it is not. You get to shape it, mold it. It’s the world you get to create, but like all energy, it too will return to the universe. So, what’s to stop part of it from getting a little sidetracked somewhere?”

It had felt like that, during those nameless hours between death and waking. Existing but not existing, part of him called back to someplace he didn’t know but still felt like home. A larger, expansive, all-encompassing home, completely different from the small, cozy, intimate space of it Shiro had made for him. And nothing at all like the loud, disastrous yet startlingly functional one the other Paladins and Blade of Marmora had helped to create. That place had been different, where black fed into white and the grays shifted like water over sand, where nothing was wrong, and nothing was right, but it simply was and would be. 

Dreaming. 

He could call it that because it had the same drowning-but-still-breathing effect that some dreams pulled you under with. But these are not fabrications of his world, where thoughts and experiences slip into the darkness of a mind wading through sleep and morph into monsters and symbols just to make the horrors and confusion of his waking life seem more manageable. 

Fingers still against his ankle, with several threads wrapped around the tip of his thumb. 

“Is it possible then for someone to harness that energy?” Keith feels his mouth draw tight as the thoughts struggle to align themselves with some sort of Proper Sense. “To. . .mark it or distort it. . .to pull it some place else?”

“Do you not do that all the time, Keith?” Slav has stepped away from the console now, all arms folded across his body. Keith can make out the furrow of his brow, the line his lips form as he once more sifts through his calculations. Slav’s top left hand drops out from its perch over the right. He brings it to his chin and curls it there, creating the perfect image of the ever pensive scientist. “Every time you connect with the other Paladins, your Lion - are you not tying your energies together? That’s your very life essence - shifting, twisting, becoming something else, _someone else’s_! Even if just for a few brief seconds. Such has always been the way of universe. . .”

“And human relations.”

Pidge has rolled herself onto her back, legs propped up on a large square container, its black latches securely locked and the keyboard floating in the air over her chest. Her hair has fanned out around her head, and the hood of her jacket has been piled over itself to create a pillow. If the naiads learned to surf space and technological channels, Keith imagines Pidge would have been their goddess. 

“All relations. . .” Slav follows up, smiling at them both. 

Something in Keith puts itself back together, though he has no name for it. He only knows that it’s important, and the moment those pieces connect and recommit, he feels the energy in him die down to a quiet, concentrated hum. Something he can use and doesn’t threaten to use him instead. 

“Cosmic dust, right?” he says, feeling the words sink into his being and reach down into the depths. 

“Whatever you want to call it, Fireball,” Pidge laughs. “But yeah, that cosmic dust stuff. Maybe you’re as much me as I am you, huh?”

Keith huffs at that as he pushes himself to his feet. Taking a moment to brush his hands against his thighs, he looks over at Slav, who is still studying him quietly. All he can offer is a shrug, indicating whatever had afflicted him had been quieted enough by Slav’s interpretation of things, though who knew how long that would last. Then he tosses Pidge a smile, one he warmed through thoroughly with every bit of affection he carried for her. “I wouldn’t go that far.”

“Keith!”

A pause cripples his steps towards the door. He turns to look at her again, eyebrows raised in question.

“What about the others?”

“Which others?”

There are far too many that fit that particular title on the ship, and he’s not about to go filing through all the potentials in the hope that he lands on the right one by chance.

Her eyebrows draw together, a mix of exasperation and uncertainty worrying through her expression. “Lance and Hunk. . .”

If it hadn’t been for the fact that he could read those names over her lips, Keith would have needed her reply repeated at something louder than a solemn whisper. He gives his head a slow shake.

“Not just Allura, but even Kolivan and Shiro still don’t think it’s time to tell them about this yet. Not until maybe you and Slav can find something to do about it. We can’t afford them worrying about us every mission we take. . .”

 _We can’t afford them dying in our place_ is what he wants to say, but he seals that thought in a vault and throws the key deep into the black of his headspace. 

Pidge looks set to give some retort to that claim, mouth an unhappy line and fire flashing in her eyes. Instead, she simply rolls onto her side and waves him off with a flick of her hand. 

“Go make yourself useful then and I dunno. . .spoonfeed Shiro mac-and-cheese or something.”

“I am not -”

“Working now, Keith!” 

He has nothing else for that, but sometimes, he thinks the universe comes together in ways you least expect, not exactly cementing up the fault lines that fractured you in the first place but giving you enough solid ground to keep going. He waves his hand as he walks through the door. 

Maybe he doesn’t get to make it through this thing whole. Maybe no one ever did, and that’s the great big lie about life. 

But that doesn’t mean he won’t make it.

***

Shiro is sprawled along the length of his bed, Keith’s to be exact, with his legs run out along the length of it and his arms tucked beneath his head. There’s nothing but the neon purple track lighting to see by, running along the upper and lower edges of the walls, but it’s enough.

It’s always been enough in these moments.

Silence has made itself a guest again, filling the room and inviting conversation. None greets Keith, however. He hadn’t expected it though, so he moves into the room, shrugging out of his jacket and pulling off his shirt. His boots go next, followed by his socks which he tosses into a pile of clothing designated as laundry. Nothing is said as he climbs onto the bed, straddling Shiro and staring down at him with all the expectation of a fledgling hawk waiting to be fed. 

After a moment, Shiro brings his hands to Keith’s hips. He seems to contemplate his choices over the next minute, running through them as one might a catalog, considering options and costs for all the things wanted. His lips part just enough for his tongue to peek out as he pushes it against his lower right canine tooth.

Their gazes meet. 

Keith leans into Shiro’s touch, encouraging the tentative inquiry of thumbs over his hipbones.

“Do you forgive me?”

“That’s not the question you should be asking. . .” Keith replies quietly, reaching down to brush the white of Shiro’s hair from his forehead. “Do you forgive yourself?”

Shiro laughs at that, a mirthless sound that dies as quickly as good intentions in back-to-the-wall situations. It’s a needle in Keith’s heart, threading pain across its surface with even stitches until Shiro’s heartbreak has made itself another home in him. Without a second thought, Keith leans down and captures Shiro’s mouth with his. 

A desperate plea of a kiss, begging forgiveness for them both. For the first breath, Shiro’s lips are as unmovable as the Devil’s own heart, motionless in their denial. But his eyes are breathing monuments to human pain, complete with a touch of surprise when some small part of the world shows itself still willing to embrace him. Just as Keith is about to pull away, a hand starts to drift up his back, and a sigh breaks free between them. Shiro keeps his lips parted as Keith presses in again, and this time he can taste Shiro’s breath, the heat of his tongue. 

Fingers slink into his hair, cupping the back of his head almost reverently. He huffs out a laugh, nipping at Shiro’s lower lip, then kisses him again, open-mouthed and needing.

Shiro whines against his lips, a sound of breaking. Perhaps it’s not full forgiveness, but it’s enough of it to find Keith again and still want to claim him. He grinds his ass down against Shiro’s cock and laughs as that whine turns into a heavy groan, built on burgeoning desire. 

Laughter finally spills over Shiro’s lips. A smile curves against Keith’s lips, and it has his own drawing one in return.

Sometimes, he thinks it’s a strange thing, this desire between them. An eternal flame sparked years ago when Keith had been the best of the up-and-coming and Shiro had been a hero to all, and it’s been burning steadily since. Keith doesn’t think there’s anything capable of extinguishing it. Least of all death. 

He’ll want, and he’ll want, and he’ll want. 

All it takes is a look, a touch, and Keith feels that same thought pass between them, sharp as lightning splitting the skies. It awakens every nerve in his being. One second, his whole world lights up, and suddenly, the darkness is as harmless as rainwater rolling over the back of his hand. 

And that. . .that means everything. 

Shiro’s left hand gravitates towards his ass, fingers curling over his back pocket and giving a light squeeze. The pressure causes a jolt to run through his own cock, reminding him that want often takes a more physical turn and that it can be just as demanding as anything battle would think to pull from them. Pressing his ass into Shiro’s hand, Keith draws his head back and brushes the tip of his nose against Shiro’s.

Their eyes meet again, and this time, it’s a different fire that burns in gray eyes. This one doesn’t consume but illuminates and brings warmth. It makes lives better. 

“I love you, Shiro. . .” Keith murmurs. “I do.”

He watches as pain flickers in Shiro’s gaze, feels the smile pull a little tighter. 

“Forgive yourself,” he whispers again, leaning in to kiss Shiro once more. He doesn’t close his eyes, however, waiting and watching until something wavers in Shiro’s, and it’s like water washing over flame, with neither dying from their intermixing. Keith closes his eyes then, and seconds later, tastes salt.

Shiro’s hand begins to stray, pulling from the back of Keith’s head and skating down the line of his spine. Keith arches his back at the touch and pours himself more deeply into their kiss, breaking away with a soft _pop!_ only to dive back in as Shiro pursues his mouth. A second hand finds his ass and both dig into cloth-covered flesh, encouraging as Keith rolls his hips against Shiro’s. 

They rock together like that for minutes, drowning in the silence of their thoughts. A relief, really, to hand himself over to something that requires him only to act. And every press or pull of Shiro’s body is like a star calling him home, growing brighter and brighter the closer he gets. 

Shiro starts to pant quietly into their kisses, and Keith takes to sucking his lower lip into his mouth, waiting for the moment a moan bursts on Shiro’s tongue. When it does, he grins, pressing his lips in short, fierce kisses against Shiro’s mouth until he’s robbed of that possibility entirely. Pleasure stolen, only to be returned as Shiro’s lips descend over his throat. Teeth scrape along his pulse point; Keith’s hips stutter-step against Shiro’s.

The bite, when delivered, comes just below his collarbone, and it has Keith cursing loudly at the top of the bed. He knows the ceiling can’t hear him, but maybe God does. 

Hands dig into his ass again. Keith drops a moan above Shiro then smacks him against his chest a moment later when a chuckle warms up the bite mark already flourishing over his skin. 

“Are you trying to make me come in my pants?” Keith mutters, still rolling his hips regardless. 

Shiro grins up at him, then drives himself up against Keith’s ass with a light slap against it. He can feel how hard Shiro already is, cock still clothed but already aching for him. “I could start with that.” A flick of tongue heats up Keith’s left nipple. “But I would have to ask for another round. . .”

“Let me rephrase that - are you trying to make this hell for me?”

“I don’t know about that,” Shiro muses before circling his tongue around Keith’s nipple again. He’s looking up at him the entire time, taunting him. But before Keith can think of retorting, Shiro is smiling at him with the same sort of smile that tells him love is forever, and hearts can be sold at costs great but with returns greater. “I think you've made a rather fine heaven out of our hell this time.”

“Have I ever told you how much your sense of humor sucks?”

“Just last week. . .and the week before. . .and maybe -“

Hands pressed to either side of Shiro’s face, Keith leans down and kisses him hard. As it fades into something slower, something stemming more from the soul than from his groin, he finds himself smiling against Shiro’s lips. 

“Shut up, Takashi.”

Laughter washes against the corner of his mouth at that. It’s not spoon-feeding Hunk’s green version of mac-and-cheese, but it is something infinitely more like home. All bare your heart and mend your wounds.

Come, rest your soul with me.

It’s realizing you still have a place that wants you in this great big beyond of life. When he’s in Shiro’s arms, Keith knows he gets to define himself again in ways this war and a universe’s expectations has tried to splinter apart. Shiro is hearth, and he is home, and he is not perfect, but like creaky floorboards and chipping paint put the charm in worn but well-lived dwellings, he is still the place Keith finds himself again.

“Yes, sir.”


	5. Four

Things change. 

They always will, inevitably so, and Shiro finds that to be one of the biggest lies of time, which marches forward with the same measured out markers, no faster or slower. Heedless of suffering, blind to pleasure, Time does not change, but things will always change over time.

That is the one true constant of the universe. 

The conference room had been vacated hours ago, leaving him with an audience consisting of only a handful of the castle’s pristinely white chairs and a tabletop still clogged with forgotten battle plans. Galaxies shuffle across the projection floating in the center of the room, shifting from brilliant emerald greens to neon-lit purples to empty-sky blues. They move at a meandering pace, giving the viewer a chance to decide whether he wants to detour in this cut of space or another. If he needed, Shiro knows he could have flown through the known universe with a flick of his wrist.

Instead, he reaches out and dips his fingers into the Epigoni galaxy. It stills over the screen, its planets pulsing for a moment before settling into their respective orbits. Every so often, a star will shimmer, as if reminding him there are hopes still hanging on them and that he potentially has a hand in delivering some of them into reality. At the bottom left corner, three planets sit dark, their colors eaten away by a sun-starved gray. To the right, a larger planet still blinks with life, bright green illuminating its surface with thin red lines blaring from its left side, four of them equally spaced and growing longer the more distance they consume. 

It takes approximately five seconds for the first line to meet the surface of its neighboring planet. When it hits, the impact causes it to rattle then fragment. Two seconds behind it is the next line, and by the time it shatters, there’s no trace of the first. That one has already regenerated, bursting forth from its home planet as though it had never known death. 

Shiro runs his index finger through those lines and watches as they ripple away from his touch only to try and converge over it once more. Like piranha unrelenting in their feasting, the red builds around his fingertip until another flick of it sends the color scattering out across space. 

“Something is bothering you.”

He hears the concern in that voice well before he lets himself see it. Instead, he watches as the red lines piece themselves back together, pulling specks of scarlet from the darkness until they reunite and begin their journey all over again.

“It feels like we’ve been having more trouble lately,” Shiro replies, turning his gaze to Allura as she pulls to a stop beside him. She’s been preparing for bed. He knows this because her hair has been pulled up, piled messily on top of her head and held in place by golden threads; the neckline of her nightgown is just barely visible under her robe, the lavender one he recognizes as last year’s birthday present from Pidge. It had completed the ‘pampering’ set Lance had put together for her, as the team’s way of saying ‘thanks for putting up with all our shit for another year.'

Folding her arms over her chest, she stares up at the map with an unblinking gaze. After a moment of study, a small frown starts to worry at her mouth. “Like the Galra are anticipating our reactions?”

“Do you always cut to the chase like that?”

Allura arches an eyebrow at him, but the smile she displays is nothing but amused. “Do you always stand alone in conference rooms brooding?”

“Touché,” Shiro chuckles, shifting his gaze to the map again. He coughs out his next exhale and feels the quiet settle over him like a hand-knit blanket. The kind you swear you’d never use but always did once the cold started biting through walls and doors and insisted on creeping under your skin. With a lift of his shoulders, he repositions his arms over his chest, fingers resting lightly against his biceps. “It’s not only that, but planets are going silent.”

“We’re still saving them.”

“We’re losing them, Allura.”

She flashes a look at him then, all thunder-struck and fight-ready. He can feel it booming in the very center of him. But rather than cave before the might of her best intentions and better hopes, he merely shifts his weight to his left foot and nods his head towards the projection. “There were more distress signals before. Not much more, but they were there.”

“Shiro. . .”

He shakes his head at her, cutting into the argument before she can coax it to life. 

“I don’t always trust my memory, and I thought for the longest time that maybe this whole. . .situation was messing with my head, but I’ve been tracking it. Two weeks ago, the planets of Aegia, Proma, and Eurya were all sending out distress signals. They’ve stopped.”

“Shiro, that’s Galra territory. I’m fairly certain it has been for awhile now.”

Concern swims in Allura’s words, gentle but threatening to drown him nonetheless. Both eyebrows lofted, Shiro tips his head to look at her, a frown chewing on his lips.

“Was this before or after your last reset?” she quietly prods.

“After.”

“Would the castle logs still have the signals documented?”

“It might be worth looking into.”

“Right,” Allura confirms, following her words with a sharp nod of her head. “Tomorrow morning then, we’ll compare what you’ve got to our records. But I have to admit, Shiro, I don’t remember any of this. . .Kolivan hasn’t made mention of it either.”

He knows the questions being asked of him, hanging there by threads from every word strung out between them. The things Allura wants to quietly ask him but won’t. The circumstances she wants to clarify but knows that neither of them can. 

Because Shiro still doesn’t know where he goes when Death makes its claim over him. It’s a place as endless as the scope of the human heart itself, and just as labyrinthine in its construction. Twisting and turning, ever changing. When he’s there, he knows he’s supposed to find home, but home is a place so far behind him he feels he’ll never return. So, he searches and searches, putting hands to walls that are there but aren’t, shifting as rapidly as his own thoughts, one minute as solid as lacquered onyx, the next as intangible as cloud-cover with his hands pushing right on through it.

In that place, he’s lost, but he’s not waiting to be found. 

Then he wakes. 

What felt like years looking for something he’d dropped along the way is condensed down to a few seconds of his life, this black marble that rolls across the surface of his thoughts until he puts it away. The world still exists, Keith still loves him, and he imagines that the sun still shines down on planet Earth. 

“I remember, Allura,” Shiro says quietly, his gaze still on the map. 

He hears clothing rustle, and seconds later, feels Allura’s hand settle on his shoulder. She gives him a gentle squeeze. When he looks down, the smile she offers is gentler still.

“We have faith in you, Shiro. We always have.” A yawn breaks up her next words, and instead of trying to find all their pieces, she simply laughs and shakes her head. Perhaps in the hopes to dislodge another thought or two from the hands of Sleep. “Get some rest. It’s not like we have an easy day tomorrow.”

A smile tugs his lips into tight alignment.

Has easy ever been in the Paladin’s vocabulary? 

Maybe it came as some convoluted notion of the idea, where comparatively speaking between ‘God speed - you’ve just passed through Hell’s gates’ and ‘Sisyphus needed a break, but somebody’s gotta roll that stone’, _easy_ is getting to suit up and climb into an armored war machine. _Easy_ is hoping someone’s lucky shot or your poor choices don't end up with you dead by the end of it.

Shiro turns as Allura’s hand drops from his shoulder and she begins to make her way out of the room. 

“Good night, Allura.”

She disappears with a small, questioning smile and a wave of her hand. “Sleep well, Shiro.”

**

Keith is an inferno in motion. Heat trails from his fingertips, their motions restless as they move back and forth, brushing against his palms only to jump away like a horse shying from the shadows thrown at it by the clouds above. Reckless, endangering movements that thread tension all throughout Shiro’s shoulders. Fire consumes Keith’s gaze, and every step he takes leaves emotion melting over the floor, volatile as it stains and degrades. Shiro can feel it burning right through him.

It’s making their bedroom insufferably hot.

“Are you going to talk about this or are we going to sit here and act like you don’t have a lot of things you’d like to say to me at this moment?”

Those won’t be his last words, but Shiro knows he’s willingly stepped on a landmine and he’s just waiting to see what part of him it tears into first. For a long moment, Keith says nothing. He stands there, arms having settled for crossing over his chest with fingers digging into his biceps like they can’t wait to see the scars carved into his bones. 

One for every heartache. 

This is only another in a long line of them. Shiro wishes he could have seen most of them coming, but who would ever expect to have their timeline severed only to have it sutured back together hours later? Like the gods made some mistake, and instead of sweeping it under the rug or making constellations out of the pieces of his soul they simply decided to rework fate.

 _My bad_ the great above boomed down to a world long deaf to its words. 

Shiro still feels the attempts, and today it sits like a newly fashioned scar across his chest, impossibly tight and starting to itch like all forming scars tend to do. The same one he imagined should have ended him days ago, but instead had been negated by Keith defying orders and costing them half a planet’s trust. 

Pacing.

Keith is pacing, and it’s driving the last bits of Shiro’s patience right into the ground, somewhere around the place he thinks he buried his memories of his latest death. That one that left his ribs gaping open and the pain scorching across his nerves. Druid work. Experience has told him there is nothing cleaner or crueler than the wounds a Druid inflicts. He swears he can still feel their magic kicking at his nerves until they’re wide awake with pain. 

The same death Keith remembers far too vividly because he had been standing right there in a chokehold while they made him watch. 

People always like to think death happens when the life shrivels up within a body and its soul flees from shrinking confines, but they forget about the deaths that eat up the living. Shiro remembers the desperation in Keith’s gaze, horrified and frantic. He just doesn’t remember what came after.

“In front of everyone, you reprimanded me for saving your life, Shiro! For what? Because the Ahemaitians feel we let them down?”

 _A select few does not constitute not everyone._ But Shiro is certain those may have been his last words, so he settles for something else less condemning. 

“We let their sacred temple be destroyed.”

“A temple can be rebuilt!”

So can lives, apparently. Shiro doesn’t touch that sentiment either. Instead, he lets another truth hit harder, the one that matters when trying to build a universe-wide coalition. 

“And they think this is the wrath of their god. That Voltron is a plague!”

“Why did we even go there, Shiro!?” Keith snaps, hands flying from his chest to lash at the air on either side of him. He’s fury turned human, but more than that, he’s pain made visible. 

People don’t talk about all the ways loss tears right into the center of all that you are. How it takes its claws and starts with just the tips digging in, dragging down, until at some point you’ve been completely gutted, watching emotions fall out like entrails and leaving you wondering how in God’s all-consuming hell you’re ever going to piece yourself back together. 

Shiro feels it just as acutely.

Because he remembers. 

He still remembers. 

There’s blood on his hands, and breath rattling in lungs that aren’t his, and eyes that don’t see but lips that still smile as they form the letters that spell out _I love you_ when Shiro knows they mean _I’ll see you again_. Because Keith remembered too and he had believed in that fact.

Shiro doesn’t always. He’s waiting for the end. 

“Kill on sight.” Keith runs his right hand through his hair while the left tries to figure out what to do with itself. At first, it reaches for him with fingers curling in tight as a rosebud’s new bloom when he thinks better of it, then it drops against Keith’s thigh with a sharp slap. There it stays, where his index finger scratches the surface of his pants. “You heard the transmission the Blades intercepted. We’re not targets to be captured anymore, Shiro. Kill on sight.”

He says those last words with all the finality that The End should rightly carry.

Kill on sight. A story closes. The world keeps on moving, and hearts keep on beating, and somewhere something gets lost along the way.

A lot of things tend to get lost.

“And what do we do about that?” Shiro asks, calm, quiet. Doing his utmost to rein in his own frustrations and force them into some semblance of controlled chaos. This isn’t a star crowning its death; it’s trying to shove an impending explosion back into its universal casings and hoping it doesn’t go blowing out some other end. 

Keith throws his hands up and lets them hover there beside him for a moment before dropping them back to his sides. Fear is closing in on his irises, giving their purple an almost preternatural glow, like a soul’s last fight against the encroaching dark. That moment when it burns the brightest. He knows this look, and like so many other things he has come to recognize about Keith, Shiro knows he can’t stop the rise of emotions from washing over Keith’s thoughts any more than he could stop his own want for Keith himself.

Some things simply happen. Never asked for, never fully known, but there they are. Loss is like that, and Shiro sees it tending to Keith’s fears. He feels it moving within himself, grinding his patience down as he keeps looking for answers, keeps trying to reason through a parade of seemingly senseless deaths and remind himself that Keith still lives despite them.

That’s the tricky thing about love. It sits like a monument, constructed right there at the very center of the heart, heavy with its own worth. A good and solid weight. Built to last, they say, The blood rushes around, paints it red with everything you are, and you come to know it as yours, even as it’s built out of _them_. And when _they_ disappear, when its finely sculpted edges start crumbling and bits of it start flooding your veins and putting the pain of remembered bits and pieces of them throughout your entire body, fear comes flooding along with it, whispering of the grief to come. 

Shiro reaches out then. His fingers press against Keith’s wrist, light and questioning. Nothing is said; for right now, he thinks they both understand they are beyond words. He waits and waits until Keith turns his hand around and tentatively takes hold of his hand. 

This isn’t a star crowning its death. This is trying to find enough fuel in the universe to keep burning bright.

“I’ve seen the maps, Shiro,” he murmurs as he interlaces their fingers. Shiro takes another step closer. Keith bows his head against his chest. “I know. . .And even if they don’t. . .I think something happened back then.”

“Back when?”

“Back when I found you.”

Shiro smiles at that, grim amusement lining the curve of his lips. “You’ve found me a lot of times, Keith.”

“You know when.”

The fear hasn’t left Keith’s gaze, but when Shiro meets it, he sees something else there. A strange sort of resilience born of recollection, dark with understanding. It takes only seconds of meeting that stare head on for Shiro to know the precise moment Keith is talking about, and it has something clawing at his guts over the memory of it. His mouth makes an unhappy twist of itself. 

“I thought you said they hadn’t done anything to you then. Not like with me. . .” Shiro says quietly. His eyes never leave Keith’s, searching through them cautiously like the wreckage after a storm. Seeking bits of truths tattered but not quite destroyed.

“They didn’t. Not that I remember. . .But they still examined me,” Keith answers. His words are coated in honesty, his gaze fierce in that belief.

Shiro exhales softly. “But it was the only time they had both of us.”

Keith nods at that, giving Shiro’s fingers a soft squeeze. “I know we’re starting to lose this war, Shiro. I’ve seen your notes. I’ve talked to Pidge. . .”

“Allura still doesn’t know what to make of that,” Shiro laughs out brokenly. He doesn’t have answers for her, only what he knows as his own truth defining his own existence.

“Pidge thinks there’s something to it though. I mean, if it weren't for her, we never would have been able to show them and at least make them question their own timelines.”

He nods at that. The logs hadn’t been very helpful at first. They had looked like rearranged file folders instead, with the most recent data replacing the old and the old having been obliterated by the new. No recognizable traces. Shiro had marked every date they reset, and for every morning they checked, the information no longer aligned with what he had known or documented. Numbers had shifted, percentages changed. More than half of the known universe is still under Galra control, but on the twenty-fourth of last month, it had been at forty-nine percent. And the month previous, it had been forty-three percent. 

Allura had smiled at him when he had explained, a little apologetic, a little confused, still wanting to believe in him. But she remembered the numbers only of that morning. It’s as though History had stepped back in to correct itself to make sure the future made sense. Keith dies. Time resets. Shiro saves Keith. The world changes in small fragments. History stares at the inconsistencies and blinking at its pages, erases them and reformats. 

Voltron no longer has the edge. 

Until Pidge had found the lost remnants of their time, buried and distorted in the castle’s logs. Side by side, two reports sat, each dated the same, each displaying conflicting information. There was the original date, the first death, and then there was the morning of the reset.

Shiro still has no answers. Neither does Pidge or Allura or Kolivan.

_A glitch, maybe?_

Keith had practically snarled at that suggestion.

“It won’t do us any good if we can’t find out why this is happening,” Shiro sighs out. There’s a faint drumming at the back of his head, and he doesn’t know if it’s the call of an impending headache or war drums echoing out across the void, reminding him that things once started needed to be finished. “And I don’t know that we’re going to be given the time to find that out.”

His last words drop like a fallen star. Not the ones that go shooting across the sky with wishes on their tails, but the sort that tumbles out of the night, its hopes cut like a marionette’s strings, with all the deadweight of abandoned dreams. 

Keith’s fingers slide from his hand. Shiro feels the fading touch of his fingertips as they glide over his palm, warmth whispering in their wake.

“I’ve been thinking about this, Keith -”

“Don’t.”

“We can’t let things go like this.”

“Please don’t.”

Words can be said in so many ways, but when Keith’s voice starts to run itself bare with emotion, when his words come out strained as they try not to plead, Shiro feels like his heart has been flayed open. A raw, visceral sort of pain that sucks the air out of his lungs and leaves him convinced that Death is the genius of all human plagues because it is endlessly changing, proving that you don’t have to be ending to be dying. 

This is something he needs to say, however. Now rather than later.

“The next time I die -” _Next_ because that is the inevitable, and that Shiro believes in. “ - don’t change my fate. Just let it go.”

Keith takes a step away from him, shaking his head like a metronome keeping steady time. When he finally pulls his head up to look at Shiro, there’s a smile on his lips, half-cocked and ready to shoot off into something far more wretched at any second. 

“What do you mean _just let it go_?” he asks, incredulity sitting sharp within his words. Keith licks at the corner of his mouth, then narrows his eyes at Shiro. “Don’t bullshit me!”

“Keith. . .”

There’s a warning buried somewhere in that name, but Shiro knows Keith doesn’t hear it. Or at the very least, has refused to acknowledge it.

“I’m not losing you again!”

Steel sets his jaw as Shiro takes a step forward to where Keith holds his ground. “And for everything you and I gain, so do the Galra.”

“Do you think I don’t know that?!” Another flick of his tongue over his lips, which remain parted and just barely reveal a flash of teeth. After a breath, the left corner of his mouth twitches, showcasing his canines in full. “I get it, Shiro. We’re losing this war. I can see just as easily as you how the Galra are. . .” A pause inserts itself there as Keith searches the air for the words he wants. His gaze fixes on their bed next, and maybe somewhere in the mess of sheets and pillows, Keith finds what he’s looking for because he turns to Shiro seconds later and finishes his thought. “. . .redirecting the fates of other planets. Do you think I don't know what you’re asking for on that, and I haven’t already. . .I’m not. . .”

“Keith. . .” Softer this time, the syllables rounded out with quiet understanding.

“Then let me go.” Keith’s voice is like iron spearing through a heart. Solid, cold, cutting. “Can you do it, Takashi? Would you die without ever knowing why?”

This time, it’s Shiro’s lips strained by a smile that has nothing to do with mirth and everything to do with a soul trying to keep itself from bleeding out. He can feel the wound as his thoughts prod with ghost-fingers over the surfaces of all that he claims to be. They edge around its outline, tentative, knowing that any closer will bring pain crying out from the hole Keith’s words have cut into him. He doesn’t want to admit this, but he knows the admission has already made it to his eyes because Keith is staring at him, defiance teetering on the edge of heartbreak.

“In the arena,” Shiro begins, his words slow and carefully measured, “I didn’t know why, but I knew I could die any day. And back when they had me again, I didn’t know why either, but I almost hoped I would. But for this?”

Calm places its hand over his heart, and with its touch, Shiro feels his heartbeat steadying, his thoughts clearing. Under it all, he can see. 

“I know, Keith.”

He can see how pain makes homes of human souls. He can see how he can avoid the avoidable and how he must accept the unavoidable, where choices have to be made and how pain can reside in those decisions as well. He can see how one death can result in two, how another can still rise from the ashes and pursue greatness.

He sees how wrongs can be made right again with sacrifice as the turning point.

“Fine. I’ll die for you then.”

Shiro stares at Keith, and it feels like he’s seeing him for the first time today. He’s barefoot, the edges of his pants frayed around his ankles but still hugging tight to them. Over the years, Shiro has seen Keith slowly branch out with his style, the colors mostly, though he has expressed a loyalty for black pants that often left Pidge and Lance in fits of laughter every time they got a chance to pick up a few items. The shirts he rotated, all of them body-skimming and ranging in hue from nocturnal purples and blacks to sunset reds, and as adulthood took full bloom, outlining every dip and ridge made by muscle. Keith caught the eyes of most who set sight on him, and Shiro had had to be reminded more times than he cared to admit to refocus on the task at hand whenever Keith had made an entrance. Tonight, he’s in black from head to toe, save for the metallic red of his belt buckle that glints beneath the lights every time Keith shifts his weight. 

His jacket sits discarded over the desk, but Shiro has had that memorized since the first time he saw Keith wearing it. It’s a deep, blood-borne crimson leather, black piping along its seams and patched over the elbows with a conscious and stylized intent. The zipper glints silver and cuts up Keith’s torso at an angle, from right hip to left shoulder; two smaller pockets sit flanking his ribs. It was the biggest purchase Keith had made in the last two years. 

He hates spending money, but he has no problems giving it away. 

With a gentle shake of his head, Shiro continues with a quiet firmness. “We’re done discussing this right now. You’re in no mindset -“

Keith doesn’t let him finish. Instead, he’s pushing past him with a hard brush of his shoulder and words scathing in his wake. “Maybe you should aim those words at yourself a little as well.”

He’s always hated watching Keith leave. And sometimes. . .sometimes he even wonders why he lets him walk away.

Tonight, however, Shiro knows the answer to that, and he pockets it away to be processed at another time.

**

“How would you break a loop?”

“That is a very broad question, Shiro.”

Slav’s workroom is anything but a room at the moment. Shiro had walked into it five minutes ago looking for answers and found himself stepping out into the universe itself. All around him, stars shimmer and pulse, some so near to him that all he has to do is lift his hand and spread his fingers. He watches as several pinpoints of light slip through his palm, defy the solidity of his bones and reconstruct themselves on the other side of his hand. A planet, ravaged by time and Galra forces, enters his stomach. Shiro assumes it moves on through, about as filling as smoke, and continues on its path, no more damaged than it had been before Shiro’s body had stood in its way. 

Standing off to the left, Slav has his chin in his hand as he studies the next galaxy moving into view. Only a cursory glance had been spared for Shiro. 

“A time loop then.”

A considering hum rolls up Slav’s throat. He says nothing, though. Only tips his head to the side as another planet ambles past him, and it's then that Shiro recognizes the dark halo spinning around its body. It’s one of the lost worlds, as Pidge had taken to calling them. 

Slav pulls himself away from it, scurrying over to the other side where yet another galaxy is beginning to bloom. Shiro finds himself smirking at the way Slav hops over the lines cutting across the floor, a flood of bitter amusement washing over his memories.

“Think of these things like a watch. You know this thing, yes?” Slav glances over his shoulder for quick confirmation before he turns back to the spread of stars and planets before him. He reaches out and casts off the current galaxy with a sweeping arc of his hand. “Then inside, imagine all of those gears, turning and turning. Everything works in sequence, relying on the work put out by the gear before it. All of it connected, even the pieces that don’t touch. But!” 

Slav slips away from his task, which Shiro still hasn’t entirely grasped, and pops up before him with his last word. Shiro stumbles back a step, blinking. Slav blinks right back at him, wiggling around his body to peer through the space left by Shiro’s left arm when it jumped away from his side. Behind him several stacks of papers sit, piled high but neat, and Shiro imagines that is what has snared Slav’s attention. 

Satisfied that nothing has been swept out of place, Slav continues as he unwinds himself from around Shiro’s body. “It stops when you remove the energy source powering it or when one of its components breaks. Correct?”

“. . .when something within it dies then,” Shiro murmurs.

The thought lures a rueful smile to his lips, one Slav stares at intently. He blinks at Shiro again, lifts a hand to rub at his chin, then hums again with the high-pitched notes signaling recognition. Irritation nibbles at Shiro’s patience over the sound of it. His smile falters, twisting with discontent. 

Slav merely pats him on the shoulder before worming his way back to his previous position. His hand flicks out again, followed by the one below it, rewinding the whole system until the previous galaxy is back to its meandering start. 

“You may think of it like that, but energy. . .it always goes somewhere.” All four sets of Slav's hands fly out from his sides at that, fingers bursting like fireworks, and Shiro gets it. Energy goes somewhere, everywhere, all places and sometimes one alone. Slav tips his head back to look at Shiro. “How much faith do you have in the universe?”

“Enough.”

He thinks he does at least. That sometimes lives don’t follow designated plans, but they fulfill some purpose nonetheless, and that alone could be enough. Maybe that’s faith, or maybe it’s merely a fool’s disastrous wish. Shiro doesn’t know which of those to call this idea he’s clinging to, but faith feels like the kinder term. 

It’s better than thinking life is nothing but a crapshoot and the odds have always been against his favor. So the story goes: he lives, he tries, he ultimately dies. 

The End.

And there’s nothing grand about it, just the lives he’ll leave behind and the dreams he had half-raised now shoved off into hands younger than his but shaking just as hard. 

“Then you’ll see him again.”

Everything jars to a halt within him. The fear that had been steadily building within him stops entirely. Like a foundation left abandoned with a base perimeter of cement blocks and an empty hole at the center where a home would one day be, Shiro can only stare at the beginnings of what might have taken up residence within him. When he glances over at Slav, he’s no longer the object of study. Hands are once more dipping into the universe, conjuring up galaxies anew, all of it continuing to flow around him unabated by what had happened here.

“Zero is not the sum of nothing, Shiro. It is returning to that moment when you first became.”

“How do you. . .” Shiro stammers, brow furrowing. His confusion is unsteady, tripping over his thoughts so that by the end all he can do is stare at Slav.

A laugh is all that answers him. It’s a thoroughly amused sound, and that just strikes a match against what’s left of his patience. Shiro can feel the first lick of flames as he turns to make for the door. 

“Shiro!”

“What?!” The snap-back response is automatic, and Shiro mentally cringes at himself for the way his voice betrays his frustration.

“The cracks.” Slav flickers his fingers at him, at least sixteen of them. “Don’t go stepping on them all crazy now. . .”

Shiro stops and with it the corners of his mouth drop into the tested line of a frown. It holds its form when he throws a glance over his shoulder. “Seriously. . .?”

“Dead serious, Shiro! Now, hop, hop! No funny business like when you entered!”

**

Dinner had been a separate events sort of affair, with each Paladin taking to their own spots and only a few looks tossed in his direction when it became evident Keith wasn’t going to be joining him at the table. Shiro ate in silence, cleaned his dishes in silence, and made his way to the room (his and Keith’s, theirs not his) in perfect silence.

The quiet streaming of water accompanied him in the bath, and when he stepped back into the room, it was silence that greeted him.

Some nights, Shiro swears silence is louder than any nightmare that has ever beleaguered him. 

He’s sitting on the floor with his back to the base of the bed when Keith finally enters. Their eyes meet, and Shiro knows this will be a. . . _thing_ when Keith fails to avert his gaze first. Instead, he stands just inside the doorway and watches Shiro with an oddly critical eye, like he’s trying to decipher his very DNA, the things intrinsic to nature that might lead a man to decide that cutting his life short is worth setting a few things right in the world.

Keith sees his answer, or so Shiro thinks because, after another minute, he’s moving further into the room and absolving silence with every step. By the time he reaches Shiro’s side, Shiro finds he can no longer blame the quiet for his misery. There is only Keith and himself and the choices that sit between them. 

Without a word, Keith drops to his knees and digs his way in between Shiro’s until he’s nestled between his legs with his back to Shiro’s chest. And Shiro makes way for him, his body opening up to accept Keith and all the unsaid between them, like church doors swinging open for midnight sinners, ready to offer relief and respite to weary and heavy hearts. Keith tips his head back against Shiro’s shoulder, lips parting, but the words don’t come. Instead, he shuts his eyes and tugs Shiro’s arms around him. 

Minutes pass. Fingers intertwine. Hearts continue to beat.

This is the silence that speaks, and Shiro listens intently to it. He dips his head down to settle it beside Keith’s, closing his eyes with a gentle squeeze to the fingers wrapped around his own. A reply comes moments later in a burst of pressure as Keith’s fingers tighten around his and relax seconds later. Breath by breath, Shiro can feel the tension slide from the body tucked up against his own. After another minute, Keith tips his head and places his lips to the underside of Shiro’s jaw. They linger there, apologetic, then move to his neck. 

Shiro exhales heavily, sinking against the bed and pulling Keith in closer to him. He thinks, maybe this is how worlds actually end. No great flashes or rattling bangs that hollow out men’s souls, but in a silence that whispers of all the things that will be lost so hold on tight.

Hold tight.

And go down with these memories.

“I don’t know that I can do it, Shiro.”

Keith’s voice is raw like he had been shouting at the void of the universe for hours on end and realizing the stars would never answer him back, turned from them and made his way home instead. Because you can want and you can want, and you can want, and it doesn’t always mean the universe likes the plans you’ve spent years dreaming about building your future around.

Maybe it’s not even about liking said plans, but realizing that the machinations of empires and the beings behind them will ultimately smother someone’s heart. 

Not everyone makes out better in the end.

“You will because you love all of this as much as I do,” Shiro murmurs into Keith’s hair.

Not everyone makes it out.

“What if it doesn’t work? What if we just start again. . . .” Keith asks, and never have words sounded so heavy while delivered on so bare a whisper. He drags Shiro’s hand up along his chest and bows his head down to press lips to calloused knuckles, as if that might seal in the rest of what’s knocking at Keith’s throat, clamoring for release.

Shiro sets his lips to Keith’s temple and breathes out his next words with a tremble. “Then we find another way.”


	6. Five

“Is it possible? I mean if a soul is just energy. . .if it’s part of this cosmic dust thing, then couldn’t it be defined somehow?”

Keith tucks his ankle under his opposite thigh and settles a little deeper into the couch. Sitting opposite from him, Lance just blinks, lifts his eyebrow and rolls his head down at Pidge. Her territory, not his. Unless Keith wanted some smart ass retort, which Keith is pretty certain he does not want at this time. 

He never really wants those for the record. 

Lance seems to question that notion for a moment, lips parting for the verbal poking until he’s cut off by Pidge.

“I mean, theoretically, sure! But no one has ever proven the existence of a soul or any sort of ‘soul energy’ or whatever you want to call it.”

She’s sprawled out over the length of the couch, her head nestled against Lance’s thigh and hands raised to entertain some off-brand game of paddywhack with Lance. Their palms hit with quiet slaps of skin until he deviates and sends fingers marching over her ribs like troops hell-bent on breaching enemy lines. A shriek splits the air as Pidge rolls onto her side, followed by a lower octave grunt from Lance when retaliation comes in the form of a gut punch. 

“But they’ve had ten thousand years!” Keith calls out, irritation clashing with his own sense of amusement over the sight. Lance currently has his hands dug into Pidge’s hair, ruffling the strands relentlessly, while she has her hands wrapped around his wrists. Curses stream from her mouth as merciless and swift as class five rapids. They stop at Keith’s words, however, both blinking slowly at him from a mess of hair and limbs. Everyone knows who the unnamed _they_ are. “And maybe this quintessence stuff. . .what if it can mess with something like that?”

Lance breathes out at that, mouth dipping at the corners. “I thought quintessence was some weird Druid magic stuff. Kinda like alien steroids pilfered from the universe by highly illegal means for the Galra to dope themselves up on and make shitty and also highly illegal experiments - “

“Whose legal and moral standards are you even using here, Lance?” Pidge breaks in as she pokes at his hip.

He grunts again, then grins down at her as he snares her wrist with his hand and threatens her ribs with another wiggle of his fingers. “Mine, of course. By which I mean the only ones I really know, so Earth’s, but if you ask me, all these space species seem to have the same sort of concepts about human-alien-life rights. Don’t do drugs. Don’t fuck up other planets. Don’t capture and enslave others and do weird freaky experiments on them - no offense to you, Shiro - but I’m just saying, we’re kinda on the same page. And the Galra aren’t always. . .”

Shiro gives a wave of his hand from where he’s seated at a table, scanning through various charts. Keith flicks a glance to where he’s sitting, noting the tight lines around the corner of his mouth. He recognizes the blue glow of letters as Altean, which means Shiro is currently going through supply logs and requests.

“Human beings aren’t always either.”

“Not everyone can be awesome. Or, you know, life-friendly.”

“Then we definitely aren’t life-friendly,” Pidge snorts, a dry humor coating her words.

Lance pokes at her stomach, causing Pidge to curl up like a pillbug and hiss in defense. “We’re fighting for life. That’s gotta count for something.”

“What do you think, Shiro?” Keith asks. He hasn’t stopped watching Shiro work, hasn’t stopped noticing the way his gaze drifts from the spill of lists before him to the whitewashed beyond of the castle’s high walls. 

“Huh? I’m sorry,” Shiro replies distractedly, pulling his attention from his small square space of existence and turning it towards the center of the room. His gaze drifts from one Paladin to the other before he offers an apologetic laugh. “What were you talking about?”

“Keith thinks he’s seen God,” Lance answers with a bemused smile. 

“And you think you’ve seen the moral high ground.”

“I love you, Pidge, but fuck off.”

Keith quietly clears his throat. “If the soul, or whatever you want to call it, is just energy, then who is to say they couldn’t have tapped into its wavelength or frequency or whatever and started distorting it?”

He thinks he sees a shift in the gray of Shiro’s eyes, a little less steel, a bit more rainstorm horizon. The worry lines between his brow have faded, and his mouth has relaxed, though the smile is still hanging onto the apology his laughter had offered. Keith knows Shiro is not all here; he can see it in the way Shiro’s gaze holds onto his as if searching for a final lifeline, can feel it in the stirrings deep within him. The movements of a heart as it calls out to a soul that is as much its own as it is his. 

Shiro is spared from answering by Pidge rolling away from Lance and landing on the floor with a well-concentrated _thud!_ as both hands and feet make contact and remind Keith of a cat that thought itself a dog and had to reconcile its reflexes with its own self-perceptions. She stands up with a brush of hands over her shirt and a tongue stuck out at Lance. It’s all very nonchalant, but Keith knows that Pidge is as at home in her well-honed awkwardness as a turtle is in its shell. Or as she’s pointed out to him on many occasions - she’s not a soldier, she’s a soldier’s strategist first and foremost. The soldiering only comes with the help of a very large, green robotic cat.

And sometimes a projectile weapon or two.

Where the couch curves, forming the bottom of the U-shape it ultimately constructs, Pidge kneels into the cushions and leans over the back with her arms outstretched. She drums her fingers on the edge of the table. “Let’s go.”

Shiro blinks at her. “I’m sorry?”

“I don’t even know why Allura handed you those because as good as you are with running supply lines, Shiro, there’s no way in hell you’re going to know what parts are needed where and who needs them the most. That’s stuff better left to Hunk.” 

Keith watches as the corner of Shiro’s mouth twitches, threatening to curve into a challenging smirk and only making it halfway there. It’s a challenge Pidge doesn’t give him the room to assert as she’s swiping the tablet from Shiro’s hands and rolling off the couch in one fluid motion all before he can cut in with another word. As she walks past Lance, she kicks at his boot with the toe of her own.

“And I need you to help me talk to the Asteriali. They’re supposed to be here any minute now.”

A grin throws itself wide across Lance’s lips as he heaves himself up from the couch. “You know, I almost forgot all about that, Pidge. So, _thank you_. Man, the last time I saw them it was like someone sprinkled starlight all over their skin.”

“They have teeth like sharks,” Pidge points out as she waves at Keith. “And their eyes are like black holes.”

“Their eyes are like polished onyx jewels. . .”

“What bad poem are you trying to write now?”

Keith barely catches the rest as Lance starts in on all the finer points of learning to love their fellow space-dwellers for all their differences, especially ones as _superbly crafted_ as the Asteriali. The last thing he sees is Pidge tossing him a soft smile over her shoulder as the door closes.

Something flutters in his heart, small and frantic, when he hears the scrape of chair legs over the floor. Seconds later, it’s followed by the heavy tread of footsteps, and Keith knows the weight that’s spilling sound into every step because normally Shiro moves quietly. Far too quietly he thinks sometimes, and it has nothing at all to do with Shiro’s size and everything to do with the monsters that breath down his shadow.

They’re all hiding from monsters, though. Keith knows this better than anyone. Some of them sit in your very bloodstream, making you wonder just when the turning point might come, or in a past that has no waypoints to guide you back home. Others are in the lives left behind, the families not seen and the goodbyes left unspoken. They sit in the graves dug, and the tears shed and the worry of what sort of decimation a sudden appearance might bring to lives that have already moved on. 

When Shiro comes to stand before him, there are no words to announce his arrival. He presses his knees against the couch’s edge, stands there for a moment as Keith’s gaze finds his, and then, he’s dropping to his knees. Along the way, he takes Keith’s hand and curls his own around it. 

If Keith didn’t know any better, he would think this is how forgiveness is pulled from souls. 

He reaches out, running his fingers through Shiro’s white bangs and brushing the hair back. A small smile jumpstarts at the corner of Shiro’s mouth, and Keith finds his lips replying in kind. Another breath, another stutter step of his heart, and then he’s bowing his head to press his lips to Shiro’s forehead.

“How much time do we have?”

“Today. . .tomorrow. . .” Keith doesn’t say anything more after that. His fingers drift over the soft hairs of Shiro’s undercut, tracing wayward designs until they reach the back of his neck. Swirling the tip of his index finger around the nape of his neck, Keith sets his forehead lightly against Shiro’s and closes his eyes. 

The universe has the answers. It just doesn’t always give you the time to find them. 

And just as you can predict a star’s death, that doesn’t make it any less devastating when he goes.

He hears Shiro swallow, followed by the soft puff of laughter that chases nervously after it. “You know, I thought all those years ago that the universe finally had my number. Every day I fought, it was like hearing the ticking of days counting down at the back of my head. Every time they took me back and messed with my body, I kept waiting for the timer to go off on me.”

Shiro’s voice is thick with emotion, forcing his words to come out slowly, carefully, and Keith thinks it’s because he would hate to waste a single syllable. Breaths are measured within their moments, and heartbeats counted as proof of continuing life. 

So, how exactly do you break down a life? Do you do it by accomplishments? The number of lives touched? The money in someone’s account or the home they have built? Is it in the planets they have saved? 

Or is it by moments just like this, when the life of a soul flares bright, recounting all the devastations that rocked it, the joys that mended it, the love that made it whole?

“Then Ulaz took back my number,” Shiro laughs, and Keith feels the way his lips move with a smile against his own. “And then the Galra had me again. . .and the universe claimed what has always belonged to it. I thought that would be the end. . .after everything I did. That’s when you stole it back.”

“I will always find you,” Keith murmurs. He’s not even sure he spoke, so brittle is his voice. He wants to trust it again, to say something more, something that has weight, so he knows it will sit right at the center of all that Shiro is and ground him to this world. 

But Shiro starts laughing once more, and it sounds like sorrow trying to defy its own nature. Something low and sweet, clothed in a sound that has never been its to own, trying to find joy but Keith only hears heartbreak.

“The universe is calling, Keith.”

*

He dreams, and he dreams, of people and broken trust, of new war machines and old ones lost.

He dreams of worlds falling to ruin, too much lost, too late to be recovered. 

Bit by bit, the landscapes of galaxies change. Keith doesn’t need the maps anymore to tell him this because the numbers do. At some point soon he knows the scales will tip disproportionately and any hope of overturning them, much less balancing them out, would be. . .well, it would be easier to try and slingshot a pebble across the universe. 

Everyone thinks wars are won by soldiers, the better-prepared ones, the ones who stand on the side of all that’s right. They forget about Chance and Circumstance. They forget the unaccounted for variables that slip in unseen and wreck havoc over best intentions and better laid plans. 

They don’t realize that wars are won by difficult choices and small sacrifices that devastate worlds. Not theirs, but someone’s. 

His world will end tomorrow. And in its wreckage, he will pick up the name of Paladin while he buries another’s, and he will continue to fight.

And he will fight.

He will fight.

*

“What did you do today?”

The smile that greets that question has Keith’s heart dancing with anticipation. Short little breath-stopping pulses that put a near tangible shake into his fingers. Shiro is dressed in full administrative regalia tonight, from the white overcoat with its jet black lines coursing over the seams and gleaming silver buttons right down to the polished black boots with their equally polished silver buckles. His black pants are as form-fitting as ever and tucked cleanly into his boots. Shiro could fight in this easily enough, but more than that, he looks fit to command armies.

Not just command, but to be obeyed by them.

And here he stands before Keith with a smile that asks nothing of the like from him but promises more than it demands.

“Well, as you know, I had the usual breakfast in the dining hall where Kolivan informed me of the Ice Ring’s intent to fight alongside us. It seems the last of the holdouts in that galaxy were finally swayed by some of the Blades’ actions in their previous battle.”

Keith gives a soft hum of acknowledgment at that as he steps forward and sets his hands to Shiro’s chest. He runs fingers down one black line, skipping over the white to land on the first button, the one nearest Shiro’s neck. Starting there, he slowly works it through the buttonhole, circling its smooth edge with a fingertip before he drops down to the next one. 

“The Ice Ring was bound to follow us at some point. And they were always partial to the Blades after they saved the village chief last month.” Another button free. Keith finds himself smiling at it. “After that?”

“After that?” Shiro repeats softly as he lifts a hand and brushes several stray strands from Keith’s temple. He tucks them behind an ear, running his fingertips along its outer shell and pulling a faint blush to Keith’s cheeks in the process. A chuckle slips quietly over Shiro’s lips.

Keith thinks it’s the sound a heart could find itself to no matter how lost it got. 

“Yes, after that, Takashi,” Keith confirms, popping the third button free.

“I found Lance down at the shooting range the Blades set up for him. We spent some time talking. It seems he got himself bitten by one of the Asteriali though he didn’t look particularly concerned over that now that I think about it. Something about it not being his trigger finger. . .”

Keith snorts at that, which only makes Shiro laugh in full. During that time, Shiro’s hand has found its way to the back of Keith’s neck, where fingers have slipped beneath the cover of his hair and now skate up and down along his skin, tangling in black strands only to extricate themselves with a fine tickling sensation. He gives his head a soft shake.

“Lance is an idiot.”

“He’s enjoying his youth.”

“That’s a nice way of putting it.”

“You’ve been enjoying yours in much the same way.”

Fingers still over the fifth button as Keith tips his head up and snaps his teeth at Shiro with a sharp _clack!_ of enamel and a smirk both chastising and unrepentant. He can’t deny having fun. He simply keeps his contained.

Mostly contained, at least.

“So, is that all you did? Listen to his exploits and nurse his wounds?”

Shiro runs a nail up the back of Keith’s neck, which showers his skin with goosebumps seconds later. “No. I gave him advice and also helped him out with his marksmanship. Showed him a few things from my own Garrison days. I think it helped . . .”

Keith can only imagine it did. Though Lance would never openly admit to it, he lived for those moments Shiro offered him, and when they came, they were all he talked about for days afterward. Never in Shiro’s presence, of course. Those remained the only times the rest of them actually indulged in most of his excitement, though Pidge would eventually call him on his bullshit when he started talking about being the best the universe had ever seen. Lance would then admit to wanting more practice time with Shiro and even some of the Blades at that point. After that, everything would quiet down until he was graced with one or both of those opportunities again.

“What else?” he prods softly.

The last button pops free, though the coat remains closed over Shiro’s chest with its opened ends overlapping at a steep angle. Slipping his hands into the crevice created along the angle’s seam, Keith spreads his palms wide and runs them across Shiro’s chest. The material of his shirt is like silk, though it lacks the luster, and conforms to every divot and ridge made by muscle. It leaves nothing to his hands’ imagination, letting Keith feel in full the strength lying bound and contained beneath his touch. 

“I had lunch with Hunk. Or rather, I asked him to make me lunch.”

Hands slide over Shiro’s shoulders and slowly ease the coat away from his form. “Mac-and-cheese goo?”

“Mac-and-cheese goo,” Shiro confirms with a laugh. “I swear it’s actually better than the Garrison’s.”

Keith works the sleeves down Shiro’s arms, left then right, and turns to look up at him with one eyebrow lifted. “Anything is better than the Garrison’s dining options.”

“I don’t know about that. . .” Shiro shrugs his shoulders, then lifts one arm after the other, until the coat is resting free within Keith’s hands alone. “You can’t really mess up mac-and-cheese.”

“You burnt mac-and-cheese, Shiro. Like brick-burnt it.”

“Once.”

“You say that like it’s an accomplishment.”

“Isn’t it?”

Keith feels the grin pulling at his lips, and as much as he wants to deny it, it’s there with full amusement onboard. Setting the coat over the desk, he gives it a solid pat before turning back to Shiro. “For you? I guess it is.”

“I see you’re not pulling any punches tonight, huh?” Shiro grins right back at him, and he looks. . .young. Not like he’s devolved in any sense of the idea, regressing through the years, but rather like he’s found happiness. It’s all boyish charm and fool’s romanticism. 

For a moment, all Keith can do is stare, hoping that his memory won’t betray him in this. 

A blush starts to spread over Shiro’s cheeks. He cuts his gaze to the side with a laugh he coughs up into his palm. 

“You going to keep looking at me like you’re gonna miss me or are you coming back over here?”

Pain spears his heart at those words, but Keith shakes the would-be tears away as he moves back over to where Shiro is standing. “I am going to miss you, Takashi.” He sets his hands to Shiro’s waist, fingers digging for the hem of his shirt. “You still haven’t finished telling me about your day.”

More laughter at that. When Shiro touches him this time, it’s just below his earlobe. Thumb and index finger curl around his ear’s lower edge and rub at the velvet-soft skin. Then, his palm is pressing against the side of Keith’s neck, fingers slinking into his hairline.

“Hunk has a few more recipes he wants to try. After the backlog of repairs he has on some of the fighter ships.”

“You know he’ll serve up some of them before then.”

“Yeah. . .he always does,” Shiro murmurs, rolling his thumb along Keith’s jawline. The touch has Keith glancing up, and without warning, without thought, he’s rising up to meet Shiro’s mouth with his. It’s like the first kiss he remembers with Shiro, hesitant but wanted, sinking into wanton depths faster than steel beneath ocean waves until it consumes him whole. His hands slide beneath Shiro’s shirt, inching the fabric up over his skin. 

He parts with a soft pop of sound. Shiro licks his lips, grinning like a man made whole. 

“After that?” Keith whispers, still tasting Shiro on his tongue. Still feeling his soul quaking.

“Pidge found me actually. We sat down together, and she told me about the various theories she’s working on. . .between Slav and the Olkari. . .well, they’re amazing. . .she’s amazing. . .”

His hands push Shiro’s shirt up until Shiro finally accommodates him and lifts both his arms. By the time he has the shirt free, Keith finds awe sparking in Shiro’s gaze. It’s like catching that first sunrise in spring when the chill of winter still lingers in the morning air, but as the light crests the horizon, there’s nothing but green sprouting across the earth.

“She’s going to help us win this war,” Keith says quietly, smiling despite the ache throbbing in his chest.

“She is. . .and so will you,” Shiro follows up. Just as quiet, but far calmer.

Keith wants to ask him where he gets that confidence. How does he believe so faithfully? How could he have ever come to love him? He flicks his tongue over his lips and begins folding Shiro’s shirt.

“What else?”

Shiro hums out softly at that, and Keith knows he is watching him as places the shirt over top of the coat and then makes his way back to him. It’s only when Keith sets his hands to Shiro’s belt and slides that free with quick and decisive movements that he replies.

“Before I came here, I was in a meeting with Allura, Coran and the Blades, finalizing things for tomorrow.”

Rolling the belt up, Keith moves to place that with the rest of Shiro’s belongings. He stands there for a moment, staring at the pile he’s made. Everything in neat order. He remembers flags folded with the same sort of precision.

“Sit.”

The command comes out of his mouth before he lets himself think further on that matter. Turning to Shiro, he kicks his head towards the bed and follows in Shiro’s wake. The bed groans as Shiro drops onto it, palms hitting the sheets with a solid smack. Keith kneels before him. Shiro lifts his eyebrows, giving them a playful waggle.

“Do you think you’re going to get lucky tonight or something, Takashi?” Keith mumbles over a barely suppressed laugh.

Shiro wiggles his brow again. “I might have been hoping for something like that.”

“It’s a good thing I love you.”

“It’s a very good thing,” Shiro laughs out, and the smile blossoming after those words is brilliant. A multifaceted gesture that glimmers and gleams and takes the breath right out of him. 

It’s more than Keith can stand, so he drops his gaze to the first of Shiro’s boots and sets himself to the task of taking it off. 

“Keith, you don’t have to do this.”

Shiro says it so gently, his name full of a heart’s devotion, fire born and well tended. Keith feels the burn of it right against his own heart, searing its surface. Forever branded, but at the moment, painful and raw. Something in him wants to scream.

“Let me do this.”

The words jump out of his mouth, trembling but fierce, and Keith could almost hate the way they betray him in this moment. Shiro says nothing in return but breathes out quietly above him while he removes the first boot then works his way over to start unlacing the second. He brushes his fingers over the buckle at the top, ornamentation carrying some sort of significance like so many things tended to get when ranking got involved in the chain of command.

Keith has a pair of boots just like it, with rose gold buckles. A coat too with all the same trappings. He almost never wears it.

He never wanted to.

Pulling the second boot free, Keith then sets it aside with the other, right at the base of the bed, both in perfect alignment. Socks come next, tucked neatly into the boots. It’s then and only then that he looks up at Shiro.

It’s a decision he nearly regrets. 

Love.

Love shows itself in so many different ways, and there’s nothing but affection in Shiro’s gaze when Keith meets it. He doesn’t know what he expected. Maybe a little indignation or irritation. Flustered at the very least, but instead, it’s the foolish, stupid, impossibly warm look of a soul so completely enrapt with another that it’s very nearly forgotten its own self. 

Words clot in his throat. Emotion binds them there. 

Shiro reaches down to cup his face, and Keith can only follow the path they set to Shiro’s lips. The kiss, when he relents, is gentle. But when Keith parts his lips, it’s not for tongue or teeth but for a sob. Quiet and half-choked, more burden than he can bear. Shiro kisses the corner of his mouth lightly in its wake, then the tip of his nose followed by the spot where his brow always furrows the deepest when he’s reluctant to speak honestly. 

“Why do I have to keep losing you?” 

Keith doesn’t know where his words end and the tears begin. Another sob wracks his shoulders. His lungs are on fire, and he swears his heart has completely forgotten what it is supposed to be doing, which is namely keeping him alive. 

He can’t breathe. He can’t breathe. He can’t. . .

Shiro’s mouth is on his again, and it takes the full force of his concentration to not stumble through the act. Lips part, space finds a few millimeters between their mouths, and he swallows a shallow breath. Shiro kisses him again, soft as winter’s snowfall and just as quiet. Keith exhales through his nose. He pulls back and starts shaking his head, slow and rhythmic, feeling the ache in his core keep perfect time to it.

“Don’t, Takashi. . .”

A smile curls against Keith’s mouth. And he hates it. God, he hates it. 

“Be there for them,” Shiro murmurs against his lips. “They’re going to need you.”

Nails dig into Shiro’s shoulders as Keith drops his head down to his chest, pressing his forehead against the spot over Shiro’s heart. Arms wrap around him, strong and certain, and with one solid tug, pull Keith up into Shiro’s lap. He feels small, a mere fleck of stardust floating in the cosmic beyond. 

Too small for dreams. Too small for hopes. Too small for a future. 

“You’re going to be great, Keith.”

Those words rest warm against his ear, painted there by Shiro’s lips, and Keith knows he’ll never be able to wash them off. 

Laughter breaks apart over his tongue and comes out as a shuddering huff. Keith gives his head another small shake as he pulls it away from Shiro’s chest, and then, he smiles. A tiny thing touched up with disbelief. “Your faith in me is endless.”

“So is my love.”

“How can you say that with a straight face?”

Keith wipes at his nose, then gives Shiro’s hip a hard tap with his knuckles. The pants, he hasn’t forgotten them.

Lifting his hips, Shiro leans back onto his elbows and grins up at Keith. “It’s easy to speak the truth like that. You’ve got nothing to try and cover for. The real question is - do you believe me?”

With an eyebrow quirked upwards at that, Keith slides from Shiro's lap and gives his pants a rough tug, one after another, until he has them hanging off his ankles. 

“You didn’t wear anything under these.” Fact. Not question. Keith bunches the fabric around Shiro’s feet then rolls his pants off completely. Those too he folds with the same concise precision he had used with Shiro’s other clothing. Only after he’s set them with the rest of the pile does he turn his attention back to the naked man on his bed. 

Shiro wiggles his toes against the floor, the same grin still plastered across his face. “I did not. Do you still believe me? I really have nothing to hide now.”

“I hate you,” Keith laughs despite himself. Despite everything - the rending pain ripping into his heart, the panic chewing on his thoughts like a ravenous dog, the aching desire he still has for this man and all his terrible but honest decisions. 

He makes his way back to the bed and settles one knee after the other over the mattress, the left nestled between Shiro’s thighs. Palms press to Shiro’s stomach, their warmth causing the muscles beneath to tighten, and fingers spread wide over skin. Keith moves his way up along Shiro’s torso, letting sparks ignite in his gaze with every inch he claims until he’s slotted along the length of Shiro’s body. 

Fingers find the white tuft of Shiro’s hair and once more brush it back. He repeats this action, staring down into gray eyes, wondering if he might not drown there. It’s like stepping into those first moments of night, when sunlight still touches the sky, a pale glow along the horizon and the dark draping heavy around it. That moment of here and there when you walk that thin line between two worlds. 

Drowning in the gray of this life.

Keith draws his hand from Shiro’s hair and traces a line down the side of his face, from temple to cheek to lips. He runs his thumb along the corner of Shiro’s mouth, then kisses him, smiling. “Yes, Takashi. I believe you.”

He always would.

It takes only as split second for a perspective to shift, and Keith finds himself staring up at the ceiling half a breath later. Shiro hovers into view. A hand works its way beneath Keith’s shirt, fingertips smooth as forged starlight. Shiro’s prosthetic. Keith knows its touch as well as he knows that of Shiro’s other hand, and his body still responds in the same way, with a subtle arching of his back, a press of his hips into Shiro’s thigh. 

Lips part as a finger circles a nipple. He forgets everything else. Because at this moment, there only exists this man, touching him like he’s priceless yet coveted. 

Wanted.

Always wanted.

Keith exhales a shivering breath as Shiro’s mouth finds his ribs and kisses its way up each one until his heart has been found. As tongue traces a route around it, Keith finishes the job Shiro had started and wriggles out of his shirt. He tosses it to the floor and immediately sets his hands to Shiro’s head, one hand cradling the back of his neck, the other tugging back hair to give him a direct line to Shiro’s gaze.

And it smolders, the gray burning through the smoke rising from a dozen different emotional fires. Teeth graze over his collarbone. Keith whines softly. 

He doesn’t want to be needy, but he is. He is. 

Shiro rises up, leans in, and finds his mouth once more. There’s no apology in this kiss, no promises of forever. It’s a kiss of the moment, fierce and forward, devouring every second until it becomes part of the whole that makes up his existence. 

Keith doesn’t want to lose this, but he will.

Hands find his belt and unfasten it with the deftness experience gives to action. Shiro’s hand rolls over his cock, half-hard and still clothed. A moan slips between their kiss. Shiro devours that too.

Quick work is made of his pants, bodies roll, and as Keith lays there naked beneath Shiro, he feels exposed. Not in the way that makes him want to curl in on himself, hide away and pretend this isn’t the way of the world, but rather, like he’s uncharted territory waiting to be explored. Even as he knows Shiro has traversed the roads of his body, night after night, year after year, in this moment, Keith feels like there are things still to be learned, things Shiro still has to know before he finds himself in some place Keith cannot go.

Sometimes, Keith thinks there couldn’t be enough lifetimes for something like that. The time it would take to know another soul, to make it as much your home as your own is. . .how many lives would that require? How many stars would die, how many would be born just to encompass the time needed to travel the depths of a heart?

He doesn’t know, but he knows he has tonight.

Shiro lowers his body over his and Keith wraps his legs around his hips in welcome. Arms follow, sliding around Shiro’s shoulders with fingers splaying across the back of his neck. 

“I’m yours,” he murmurs into Keith’s neck. Those words are warm as Earl Grey on a fall afternoon, soothing as they slide over his skin, and Keith inhales deeply in their wake. 

“I know, Shiro,” he replies moments later. 

Lips find his, and everything becomes simple motion, driven by wants, by feelings Keith can’t quite deny, by the push and pull of Shiro himself as steady and gentle as the evening tide. Keith could set his heart to these things, to the way Shiro’s mouth drifts across his skin and puts a stumble into his pulse, even now. To the way his hips rise and roll against those pressed against his body, and the quiet moans that tell him he’s wanted, now and forever, he’s wanted.

When teeth set to the curve of his jaw, Keith cries out in pleasure. “Again, Takashi. . .”

He wants them, the bruises that will flourish bright as summer solstice fireworks and take weeks to fade, the imprints of fingers digging into his flesh as they stake their claims, the tracks left by nails that tell the world he’s been traveled and traversed and there’s no part of him now that isn’t known. 

He wants to strip down, night after night, and see all the ways Shiro has made him a marked man. 

And Shiro doesn’t disappoint. He works his way down Keith’s body, tracing routes with tongue and nipping until bright red bursts over skin like way-markers. From neck to shoulders, down chest and stomach, along thighs and calf, until Keith is breathless as he stares down the length of his body and finds Shiro pressing a kiss to the instep of his left foot. 

Adoration. 

He’s seen this look on Shiro’s face before, but never has it glinted as brightly as it does now, like a terrarium catching the last of the sun’s rays and spilling dawn over its encapsulated world. 

These are the things you don’t forget. The things you can’t forget it. And they will burn, and they will clog up your lungs with their smoke, and still, you will breathe them in and play them again and again and again until your whole world is nothing more than rain and clouds and renewal.

Keith watches as Shiro smiles, this small secret thing that barely peeks out from the corner of his mouth, and stamps another kiss to his ankle. 

“I loved you at the Garrison,” he murmurs, pauses, then puts another kiss to his inner calf. “And I loved you when I fell back to Earth.” Lips meet knee. “And I loved you when we became Voltron.” Then they settle against thigh, and the smile grows a little bolder. “I still loved you when we became a coalition of worlds.” The next kiss alights upon his hip, and Keith feels the breath hitch in his throat. “I continued to love you when they named me commander and you my second.” 

Shiro pauses then, peering up at Keith from his lower abdomen through white bangs and eyes burning with desire. He kisses him just below his navel, lips lingering just as his gaze hangs onto Keith’s.

“And I love you still. Now and always.”

Without thought but not without care, Keith reaches down and cups Shiro’s face with both palms. He rolls his thumbs across Shiro’s cheekbones, offering a short laugh when Shiro turns his head to nip at the right one. “I’ve loved you. . . .I still love you.”

This time, it’s Shiro pouring a laugh against his palm. “I think that makes me the luckiest man in the universe then.”

“You still have a shit sense of humor,” Keith murmurs, flicking at Shiro’s nose before dropping his head back against the pillow.

Retaliation hits him with a sharp bite to his inner thigh and a finger, cool with lube, slipping inside of him. Keith feels his cock twitch, hardening to fullness.

“I meant it, though,” Shiro replies, voice low and heated. 

Keith gives a stunted buck with his hips. A hand wraps around his cock and lulls any further thoughts of retribution to a satisfied stillness. When his lips part again, there aren’t any words to combat Shiro’s dismal humor but a moan, quiet and wanting, reminding him of that fine need bubbling in his blood and making his heart rate quicken for reasons grief will point at later and say _this. . .this is why_.

He doesn’t think of that now. He can’t. . .not with another finger slipping in and a mouth wrapping around the tip of his cock with wet heat. 

It’s all Keith focuses on, the way Shiro takes him, claims him, makes him forget there is shit in this world that will destroy hearts and ruin worlds. Beneath Shiro’s touch, Keith remembers a lifetime.

He remembers the moments he lived in full, the ones that gave meaning to salvaged lives. He remembers that he is here now and that tomorrow can wait for that is what tomorrows do best. 

They wait for the present to catch up to them.

But this is his here and now.

When Shiro finally thrusts into him, Keith doesn’t know if it’s Heaven or Hell he’s seeing, but he knows it’s all-encompassing. And maybe it’s Hell staring at him right through those golden gates, and tomorrow will be the day that he falls, but right now all he feels is Shiro, all he breathes is Shiro, all he knows is Shiro.

“Takashi. . .”

A single defining word. It’s on his lips as he comes, panted out against Shiro’s mouth, swallowed down in the kiss that follows, obliterated by the moan that breaks them apart seconds later.

Worlds end. They always do. 

Tonight, Keith dies.

*

“Do you think the gods turned their heroes into constellations because that’s where they were always going to go?”

Keith moves his head, nuzzling a little deeper into the crook of Shiro’s neck. The sheets lay forgotten somewhere at the bottom of the bed. At some point, he’ll reclaim them from the depths they’ve been relegated to, but for now, he keeps himself coiled around Shiro’s body. 

He’s been tracing the lines of scars across his chest, linking one to another like he might find the way home somewhere in the network he’s created.

“What do you mean?” Shiro’s voice is husky, satisfied. Full.

With a soft exhale, Keith stops the thought-line he had been working over Shiro’s skin and lifts his head to meet his gaze. The gray of his eyes still smolders, and Keith wonders what exactly Shiro is burning now.

Memories or fears. 

“At the end, Shiro. . .isn't that where our energy will go - back to the stars?”

A soft huff splits Shiro’s lips open. With a lift of his arm, he reaches up and runs his hand up the back of Keith’s neck, gently ruffling the hair there. “Side by side?”

Something curls up tight within his chest and it drags the words right out of his throat and down into his lungs. He nods, several short bobs of his head, as he tries to find his voice again. It feels foreign, cutting up his throat as he pulls it back to where it belongs, and when the words come, Keith wants to apologize for the way they break open, leaving nothing of himself but spilling everything for Shiro.

“Side by side. I think the gods would be that kind for us.”

*

_A lot of people have written about love (and I imagine you are probably going to want to laugh at me right from those first few words, so go ahead and laugh since I’m not going to stop there). They’ve called it oxygen, likened it to the sun and made it the ground beneath our feet. I think if something exists out there, someone would find a way to link love to it. But when I’ve asked myself what defines love, I have only ever thought of one thing, and that is you, Keith. I can’t think of my own heart without recalling you. You are in my blood, and when this world burns me down, they will find you in my bones. I know I haven’t given you everything, and maybe I have taken more than I should have, but you have always been that for me._

_Everything._

_I don’t know what good this will do, writing this to you now when I know the choices I am about to make and where that will leave you by the end of them. I am depriving you of a lifetime, and I wish I could tell you how much of me wants to give you my here-and-now forever. Unfortunately, I can’t. Like I said, my number has probably been up for a long time. But you do get my forever, Keith. I think you’ll always have it, and maybe in some other life, I’ll find you again. Because I think I had it real bad. . .not just blood and bones, but I think something of you snuck into my very soul._

_Leaving you will be my greatest regret. Loving you, though. . .that has made my whole life worthwhile. Know that I would live every moment again and again._

_But I want you to go. I want you to live and laugh and remember the better in life. I want you to be the flame you have always been, brighter than any star in my sky._

_Be great, my love._

_\- Takashi_


	7. Epilogue

It’s sound that draws him. Sharp, precise, flowing softly until it's cascading from the room and out into the hall.

Keith doesn’t know why it stops him, only that something inside of him resonates, every note sending vibrations throughout his cells until the whole of him is buzzing, right down to his very core. 

It digs that deep into him.

He can’t shake that notion. And it’s been a hell of a day, doused with classes (half of which bore him) and social interactions that can’t really be called proper interactions as they mostly revolve around him being called out for having nothing (which he is aware of, but what foster kid doesn’t have that feeling kick them in the ass every once in awhile, and that’s no matter how great of a home you come from). But people still want something from him because he still passes his classes with flying colors and can _do cool shit_ like play the guitar.

Whoever said you get to define yourself in high school must have been talking shit or reminiscing about glory days that weren’t actually all that glorious, but hindsight made them seem so.

Keith doesn’t even know where to start, which is the first problem. He’s had more last names than he can count on his hand, and until Kolivan took him in, he didn’t actually know what a home was supposed to feel like. 

He’s getting there. At least, he thinks he is. 

He can’t shake that thought either as he slides open the door to the music room and spots the source that set off all his cellular components at once. But you know, that’s what he likes about music. It dives right into your soul and finds those pieces that belong with your heart.

Sitting on the bench is a boy Keith recognizes. Just not in this capacity.

He’s Takashi Shirogane. ‘Shiro’ for short, but Keith always got the feeling that it wasn’t because Shiro felt that generous but because he was just that nice, and it was better than politely correcting someone every time they butchered your name like it was ground beef and not prime cut. He also happens to be the ever popular and rather charming power hitter of Garrison High’s baseball team.

The one that goes to nationals every year. 

It doesn’t get more cliche than Shiro. 

At least, that’s what Keith had thought until he saw his fingers flying across the piano keys with a precision that would make any artist weep. He doesn’t stop playing when Keith opens the door, nor does he stop when he shuts it and throws the room back into shadow. The shades are only partially drawn, and the sun isn’t hitting this side of the building, which makes for a watery sort of sunlight seeping into the room.

Shiro still stands out though.

“Was the music bothering you?”

Keith shakes his head. Apparently, his voice forgot its working set of chords and went over to retrieve a spare set. 

Shiro laughs at that, and even that sound carries a melody. It strikes his soul and shakes a few more pieces worth remembering loose, like how warm human voices could be when they were full of genuine concern. 

“Good,” Shiro says with a smile. He turns back to the song, which has faded into a soft lull of notes, gentle and enveloping. They make Keith think of beginnings.

Or maybe it’s starting over. Or that not everything ends. 

Hope.

It makes Keith think of hope. 

Shiro tips his head towards the open spot on the bench. “If you like it, I can show you how to play it. You’re that kid with the guitar, right? Someone said you knew piano as well.”

“How. . .how do you know anything about me?” Keith stammers. The blush lights up his cheeks like a grill with too much kerosene thrown over it. He’s pretty sure he’s roasting.

His ego is at least.

Even so, he steps closer to the piano and stares down at the beckoning spot beside Shiro. 

“I’ve heard you playing. I might have even asked for a name.”

“Did you get one?”

“Keith.”

He sits down at that with a noncommittal hum. “And you’re Takashi Shirogane, a.k.a Shiro.”

“That’s a mouthful,” Shiro laughs. “How about just -”

“Shiro. Got it.” Keith can’t help the smile that takes over his mouth, just a bit cheeky.

But he likes the way it makes Shiro laugh again, the sound as warm and satisfying as pot pie and sending a tingle through him just like ginger ale. Shiro. . .he sounds a lot like a place you’d want to belong. 

The music quiets down to a whisper, then fades out entirely as Shiro lifts his hands from the keys. “Do you know this piece?”

Keith shakes his head at that. “No. . .I haven’t really paid a lot of attention to the piano these last few years.”

Why is he telling Shiro this? Does it matter? Would Shiro even care? Does _he_ even care?

“Maybe I can spark your interest again.” 

He says that with a smile that makes something flutter weirdly in Keith’s chest, like a butterfly that never got the memo on how to flap its wings with any semblance of grace. Keith has the distinct urge to kill it before it can do something else strange, like hiccup feelings he doesn’t understand or know how to name.

“That’s assuming a lot,” Keith mutters as he pokes at one of the keys. It bolts out a note, deep and tremorous. 

“It’s just a suggestion. You don’t have to stay if you don’t want to,” Shiro says, following up Keith’s note with one of his own. It’s quieter, soothing.

It stirs the first budding of guilt awake within him. He gives his head another shake. “That song you were playing, does it have a name?”

A hum answers him, deep as the note he had played but soothing like the one Shiro had picked out. “It’s called Divenire.” And with that, Shiro begins playing it again, slowly so Keith can follow the movements of his hands. “It means ‘to become.'”

“That explains a lot,” Keith murmurs.

“What does?”

He blinks, realizing he hadn’t kept those words to himself. Glancing off to the side, Keith weighs his options. Choice one: he could get up and pretend like none of this happened. Choice two: say he meant nothing and sit awkwardly because he really liked this song and maybe he was starting to think Shiro isn’t quite so bad himself. Or choice three: he could actually answer the question like he really, _really_ wants to and hope to God or whatever is out there that took pity on people like him that Shiro wouldn’t find him a waste of time.

“The song,” Keith starts, tentatively. He digs the toe of his combat boot into the piano’s nearest leg like he might drill out a more appropriate answer. Nothing happens. “The song,” he begins again, “sounds just like that. Like starting.”

“Starting?”

Another nod as Keith brings his attention back to the way Shiro’s hands move across the keys. They’re. . .big. Not disproportionately so, though even as a junior Shiro is easily one of the tallest guys in his grade. Just.. .Keith is used to his own hands doing the things he directs them to do, and he’s never really bothered with anyone else’s hands and the things they were doing. 

So, Shiro’s hands are big, and his smile is like sunlit ocean, and he’s got this odd streak in him that makes him give impromptu piano lessons to the self-isolated and mostly contented with that lot in life. Keith likes his alone time.

Maybe though, he might like a bit of Shiro’s time. For all his bulk and good nature, the guy isn’t all that intrusive. 

“It makes me think things begin again, or that you get to become something more.”

“Something great?”

Keith offers Shiro a withering glance at that. “We’re in high school. And I’m not talking about greatness or whatever. . .I mean _becoming_.”

“Whole.”

A shiver cuts through him at that, and Keith finds himself staring up at Shiro like he’s just risen from the pyre and burst into brilliant flame all over again. 

“Yeah, something like that. . .” he murmurs, wrestling with this fledgling sense of awe. Because just like that, Shiro had gotten it, and he wonders if that’s luck or intuition at play and not some sense of camaraderie building between them. 

Chance is a shit thing to build a relationship on, and Keith would rather play his odds smartly. 

Shiro smiles again, his eyes closing as if he’s simply soaking in the moment. Like being here, right now, with nothing more than a song and Keith, is worth everything in the world. 

You know, those moments you don’t want to forget. 

Keith doesn’t think he could forget the sight though. It’s as if the tension released Shiro in one small forgiving breath, and only after seeing it flee does Keith realize it had even been there at all. Fingers continue to course along the keys, swift and focused, pulling a quiet, persistent sense of life into each note as the song moves towards the end. 

Shiro’s head bobs as the music starts to pick up again, strengthening with every press of a key. Then his eyes open, and it’s like the entirety of the universe opens up before him as the song takes flight. 

“Do you hear this part?” Shiro whispers, his eyes bright as he looks at Keith. “This is the part where you get to defy fate.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First and foremost, thank you so much for reading this! Please make sure you've checked out my artist's work [right over here on twitter](https://twitter.com/nocturneis/status/911288500854521856) or [on tumblr](http://noct-art.tumblr.com/post/165623280902/know-that-i-would-live-every-moment-again-and) and scream about how gorgeous all that hard work turned out!
> 
> This has been a lot of fun, even as I cried and broke my own heart writing this! I really hope you all have enjoyed this piece, and as I said this brings to close a timeline I had been working on for a while now. Maybe some of you figured out a few pieces by the end of this, but should you like to read the rest (in chronological order):
> 
> Salvaged Lives  
> Homecoming  
> Die for You  
> In the Shadows I will Find You  
> And I will love you through uncertainty  
> As Seasons Shift
> 
> Come yell at me over on [on twitter](https://twitter.com/ByMidnightFlame%20) or leave a comment here - all of it will be greatly loved! <3 And thank you again for reading!


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